The establishment rallied round. Philby had survived another bout of questioning by his former colleagues at MI6, one which his pursuers at MI5 thought absurdly polite and non-confrontational as if MI6 were trying to help him clear his name. ‘To call it an interrogation would be a travesty,’ said an MI5 officer.81 The Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, stood up in the House of Commons in November and said there was no evidence that Philby had betrayed the interests of his country. Philby hosted a bravura press conference in his mother’s flat in London. For five minutes flash bulbs illuminated the scene almost continuously before the questioning began.
‘Were you in fact the Third Man?’
‘No, I was not.’
‘Do you think there was one?’
‘No comment.’
Each question was met with a brief, clipped answer.
‘Mr Macmillan said you had had Communist associations. Is that why you were asked to resign?’
‘I was asked to resign from the Foreign Office because of an imprudent association with Burgess and as a result of his disappearance.’
‘Can you say when your Communist associations ended? I assume they did.’
‘The last time I spoke to a Communist knowing he was a Communist was some time in 1934.’
There was no sign of a stammer. The only suggestion of something amiss were a few hairs which had not quite been Brylcreemed into position.
‘Would you still regard Burgess, who lived with you for a while in Washington, as a friend of yours? How do you feel about him now?’
‘I consider his action deplorable. On the subject of friendship I’d prefer to say as little as possible because it’s very complicated.’82
He then served the assembled hacks beer and sherry. The following day his friends from MI6 called to congratulate him. The next summer Philby, now effectively in the clear, received a phone call from Nicholas Elliott.
‘Something unpleasant again?’ Philby said
‘Maybe just the opposite,’ Elliott replied.
Philby’s old chums, George Kennedy Young and Nicholas Elliott, had got him a job in Beirut. Officially he was a journalist for the Economist and the Observer.83 But he was also a salaried agent of the service (an agent who would be handled by an officer rather than an officer in his own right who could recruit agents). The Americans were never told he had been put back on the payroll and were unhappy when they later found out. Philby arrived in the Lebanon in August 1956. He would find a new life as a spy in a city which lay at the centre of much of the plotting and scheming of a turbulent Middle East. But, even without being aware of their grievous error in sending him there, Philby’s two friends in MI6 were going through dark times.
The mid-1950s came to be known as ‘the horrors’ by the MI6 officers who lived through those years. The wildmen known within the service as the Robber Barons championed aggressive covert operations but were coming unstuck in a spectacular and occasionally grisly way. The emerging myth of James Bond met its counterpoint in the sad tale of Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb. In April 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a high-profile trip to Britain on board the state-of-the-art cruiser the Ordzhonikidze. This was an important visit for Anthony Eden who wanted to play the statesman in the new, friendlier, post-Stalin era. The MI6 London station – run by Nicholas Elliott with Andrew King as his deputy – decided that the visit was too good an opportunity to miss and ten days beforehand put up a list of six operations to MI6’s Foreign Office adviser. The Admiralty had been particularly keen to understand the underwater-noise characteristics of the Soviet vessels.84 The placing of a Foreign Office adviser inside MI6 was part of a drive to put the service on a somewhat tighter leash, but when an MI6 officer ambled into his office for a ten-minute chat about the plans, the adviser came away thinking they would then be cleared at a higher level (as some sensitive operations were) while Elliott and his colleagues assumed that the quick conversation constituted clearance. The problem was that the Prime Minister had explicitly ordered that no risky operations were to be carried out and had already vetoed a number of plans (including bugging Claridge’s Hotel where the Soviets were staying and another operation involving a catamaran).85
The operation bore all the hallmarks of the over-confident amateurishness of the period. Crabb was an ageing frogman who had an impressive, but increasingly distant, war record foiling attacks on Allied shipping with daring dives. He was now, like others, well past his prime and living on the legends of the past. His private life was a mess with a failed marriage, gambling, drink and depression. Diving and secret work were his escape and he begged to be allowed to undertake one more mission.86 Crabb and a young MI6 officer checked into a local hotel under their real names and Crabb slugged back five double whiskies the night before the dive.87 Where Bond battled the bad guys in the crystal-clear Caribbean, the diminutive Crabb plunged into the cold, muddy tide of Portsmouth Harbour just before seven in the morning. He had about ninety minutes of air and by 9.15 it was clear something had gone wrong. For a while, it looked like the whole affair might be hushed up. The MI6 officer went back to the hotel to rip out the registration page. The hotel owner went to the press, who sniffed a good story.88 The disappearance of a well-known hero could not be covered up.
The Prime Minister, who for weeks was not even told of Crabb’s disappearance, was furious when the story broke, taking MI6’s recklessness and amateurishness as a personal affront.89 He was so angry that he broke with the normal ‘neither confirm nor deny’ rule over intelligence operations and told the Commons, ‘I think it is necessary, in the special circumstances of this case, to make it clear that what was done was done without the authority or knowledge of Her Majesty’s Ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.’90 Elliott, to cover his own failings, blamed the politicians. ‘A storm in a teacup was blown up by ineptitude into a major diplomatic incident … he [Eden] flew into a tantrum because he had not been consulted and a series of misleading statements were put out which simply had the effect of stimulating public speculation.’ Others thought Elliott was responsible for a veritable ‘one man Bay of Pigs’.91 A few wondered whether there had been a leak about the operation and if so from where. Just over a year later, a fisherman saw a black object floating thirty yards away in the water which looked like a tractor tyre. When he pulled it out with a hook he realised it was a headless, decaying corpse in a black frogman’s suit.92 Crabb’s ex-wife could not even identify what was left, fuelling wild speculation that Crabb had defected or been abducted and taken to the Soviet Union. Decades later, a Soviet frogman would claim that a tip-off from a British spy meant that he had been lying in wait. Fearing that Crabb was planting a mine to blow up the ship, the frogman says he swam up from below to slash Crabb’s air tubes and then his throat with a knife. The body was so small he at first thought it belonged to a boy. But he then found himself staring into the dying eyes of a middle-aged man. According to his unconfirmed account, he pushed the body away into the undercurrents, leaving a trail of blood.93 The reflection in the mirror held up before MI6 by the Crabb incident was not lean Bond but a drink-addled frogman doing something stupid on a semi-freelance basis. It was not pretty.
The scandal was the last straw for the hapless Chief of the Service, John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair. His weakness had led the Robber Barons to bypass him and all effective oversight: ‘Where I felt if [a proposed operation] went any further somebody would say no – and I was quite certain of my judgement to carry out the operation – [you] simply tell them afterwards,’ George Kennedy Young later said.94 In a sign of just how far patience had worn thin with the cowboys, the service suffered the ignominy of having the head of MI5 sent to straighten things out. The new C, Dick White, walked down the dusty, decaying corridors of MI6 headquarters in Broadway and found a place haunted by the ghosts of the past. ‘We’re still cloak and dagger. Fisticuffs. Too many swashbuckling green thumbs thinking we’re about to fight another Second World War,’ one of his s
enior officers told him.95 With the penchant for risk-tasking came an arrogance – a belief that they were the true guardians of the nation and its values – epitomised in a statement attributed to Young. In a world of increasing lawlessness, cruelty and corruption, he said, ‘it is the spy who has been called upon to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests … these days the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.’96
The pendulum had swung too far towards risky, gung-ho operations and White began a purge to instil more professionalism. To protect his flank he later promoted Young to be his deputy, a move he would regret. Young, as head of the Middle East desk, had been involved in plotting the 1953 coup in Iran to remove the nationalist, but democratically elected, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, in concert with the CIA, a task which seemed to confirm that aggressive, covert political action could be a powerful tool. Mossadegh had thumbed his nose at the British by trying to reclaim control of his country’s oil and the British had managed to persuade the Americans to help get rid of him. In the long term, like almost every action of its type, the coup proved to be a disaster as the Shah of Iran subsequently veered towards authoritarianism and the Iranian people blamed, and continue to blame, the British and Americans for their plight, both powers gaining a reputation for conspiring and manipulating in the Middle East (a reputation which British intelligence continues to have in many countries, in part thanks to Britain’s colonial history of such entanglements). But at the time the taste for covert action had become intoxicating, a tempting panacea to mask the bitter reality that both political and economic power were rapidly ebbing away from Britain.97 The spies hoped that with their tricks and coups they could magically preserve Britain’s status through a kind of clandestine sleight of hand.
Twelve days after White took over MI6, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and so began a farcical campaign which would lead to the shattering of the illusions of power. Prime Minister Eden took it personally. Beyond the threat to oil supplies and the concern that Nasser was taking arms from a Soviet Union challenging Britain in its old playground, the idea that some jumped-up Arab could thumb his nose at Great Britain was too much for him. Eden was all handsome, polished charm on the surface. But beneath that he was highly strung and physically and mentally under strain with gout and nerves plaguing him, feeding on delusions of British grandeur. At Downing Street on the night of the nationalisation he ranted and raged. A kind of fever took hold of him in the coming days as he became obsessed with destroying Nasser. And he was unusually explicit about what that meant. There were no euphemisms or talk of ridding him of turbulent priests. One of his ministers recalled Eden calling him up on an unsecure line and saying, ‘I want Nasser murdered, don’t you understand?’98 This was the licence to kill.
George Kennedy Young was left in little doubt about what he was being asked to do, nor did he harbour any moral doubts about such a course of action. ‘It’s not a Sunday-school picnic,’ he later commented. ‘Acts of government are not choices between good and bad. They are between two evils – the lesser of two evils. Someone is always going to get hurt by a decision of government … absolute morality, absolute ethics just does not exist in affairs of the state.’99 Before and after the war, Young drew up plans to kill Nasser, ranging from using dissident military officers to kitting out an electric razor with explosives, to using poison gas and sending out hit teams, all very redolent of the CIA’s attempts to ‘take out’ Castro a few years later, which were equally hapless. Others in the service were reluctant to engage in that kind of behaviour, concerned that they would create a martyr.100 (The only other serious request for assassination was for the service to kill President Sukarno of Indonesia, a request that was ignored owing to fears of what would come next.)101 Nasser learnt of the plans and the KGB provided him with increased security, including a caged bird to warn of poison gas.102
But the debate about assassination was a sideshow to the real action. Young would later reflect that the problem with the whole Suez plan, in which he had the lead role within the service, was that it was a last play at Empire, at pretending that Britain did not have to live in the shadow of the Americans. The conspirators concocted a secret plan in which the Israelis would first invade part of Egypt and then the British and French would intervene as ‘peacekeepers’, leaving the Canal in their hands. ‘It was the last self-conscious fling of the old British Style. Its failure may even have been mainly due to this style having become over self-conscious: the play and not the reality was the thing,’ Young later wrote. ‘As the old wartime basements in Whitehall were opened up for the task-force planners, they all flocked in … rather too puffy of face and corpulent of body to play wistful roles. They were nevertheless delighted to see each other again, swap old memories, and once more sport their DSOs, MCs and Croix de Guerre.’103
The decrepitude of the old-school British intelligence establishment was all too clear to the CIA’s representative on the Joint Intelligence Committee staff. The new boy from out of town, Chester Cooper, arrived in London just before Suez. At his first meeting, he found everyone to be very tall and wearing identical black suits (Savile Row), identical blue striped ties (Eton) and identical spectacles (National Health). As well as the latest intelligence documents, they also proceeded to hand round some Greek verse. At one point someone stuck his head through the door to announce the latest cricket score. There were groans. Cooper was then proudly shown a Latin translation of the Greek verse which had occupied someone’s attention rather than the more formal documents at hand.104
In a situation more than a little reminiscent of another Middle Eastern war nearly half a century later, when British intelligence chiefs were asked what would happen after Nasser had been removed and who would run Egypt, ‘there was a collective shrug’. They displayed little understanding of the force of Arab nationalism.105 The experts failed over Suez to see what was going on in the Arab street and to understand the resentment the presence of foreign troops created.106 MI6’s intelligence on Egypt had also been fatally compromised. An entire network run under journalistic cover was penetrated by the Egyptians and in August was broken up, with thirty agents arrested and two British officials expelled.107 This was a crippling blow whose impact would spur the desire for a new approach within the service. What the intelligence said did not matter much anyway, since the few warnings that were given were ignored.108 The whole plot had been undertaken by a tiny cabal, including parts of MI6, around the Prime Minister with even some members of the JIC out of the loop (one transferred his life savings into American investments in fear of Britain’s economic future when he found out).109 The noises from the Soviet Union were sufficiently threatening for Daphne Park, by now stationed in Moscow, to be sent out of the Embassy with the Defence Attaché to look for any signs that the Soviets might respond with force.110
The disaster of Suez was blamed by Young, in true blustering style, on timidity in Whitehall and that old canard of failing to follow through on a good plan. ‘There is a total collapse of will here,’ he says he told his contact in Israel’s Mossad during the operation.111 The failure roused American fury (although the US may also have sensed an opportunity to quash British pretensions of power in the Middle East). The real fury came not just because of London, Paris and Tel Aviv planning their operation in secret and then executing it ineffectively but because of what was happening in Eastern Europe at exactly the same moment.
As the crisis reached its apogee, Cooper of the CIA was woken by a phone call before dawn on Saturday 3 November. He drove to his Embassy in Grosvenor Square, on the way waving to the prostitutes with whom he was now familiar from these trips. There he took a call from CIA Deputy Director Robert Amory. ‘Tell your friends’, an exasperated Amory shouted so loudly that Cooper thought he could have heard him across the Atlantic without a telephone, ‘to comply with the god-damn cease-fire or go ahead with the god-damn inv
asion. Either way, we’ll back ’em up if they do it fast. What we can’t stand is their goddamn hesitation waltz while Hungary is burning.’112
From his prison cell in Budapest, Paul Gorka, the youthful resistance agent from Béla Bajomi’s rolled-up network, had sensed a change of mood through October 1956.113 One day came the sound of gunfire in the distance, the next that of heavy weapons and artillery followed by helicopters. The guards claimed it was ‘just an exercise’. Then a captured tank smashed through the prison main gate. The freedom fighters on board released the prisoners, who stepped out to find bloodstained sandbags, smashed tanks and corpses littering the streets and a fully fledged anti-Communist uprising under way. Surely, with the promised resistance at last showing its strength, the West would come to its aid?
The first Western journalist to make it into the city during those violently hopeful days was Anthony Cavendish. On his way back from a late-night party in Vienna a few years earlier, his motorbike had skidded into a cyclist. This had been one run-in too many with Andrew King, then head of the MI6 station. Cavendish had been pushed out of MI6 and joined the UPI press agency. As he arrived in Budapest the Soviets were still in retreat from the outskirts of the city. ‘On the back of one tank lay the corpse of a Soviet soldier, his eyes staring vacantly at the Hungarian capital … A Hungarian peasant spat at one tank as it passed him an arm’s length away,’ he wrote.114
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