In the city, people asked Cavendish what the British and Americans were doing and when their help would arrive. There had been no advance warning of the uprising – another failure for British and American intelligence gathering. The CIA had only one officer in Hungary, who spent almost all of his time keeping his cover up and was under orders not to take an active role.115 For a few, tense days Budapest was liberated. The Russians, for the first time, had been rolled back. And it had been done not by the CIA or by MI6 but by the Hungarian people. Then in the early hours of Sunday 4 November, Paul Gorka and his fellow fighters heard the voice of Imre Nagy, the leader of the uprising, say on the radio that Soviet tanks were on their way. As refugees headed over the border, the CIA station chief in Vienna received a stream of agent reports indicating Soviet preparations to crush the uprising. He knew there would be no cowboys riding to the rescue as the Soviet juggernaut primed itself.116 In London, officials noted uneasily that they could not protest about Russians attacking Budapest when they had just attacked Egypt.117
Frank Wisner arrived in Vienna and watched as the final messages came over from the Hungarian partisans. ‘We are under heavy machine gun fire … Goodbye friends. God save our souls.’118 Wisner felt utter impotence as the full might of the Red Army descended on Budapest. He drank heavily that night. On Vienna’s pavements people listened to the bleak news on outdoor speakers installed on lampposts.119 ‘It was desperate youngsters who sprung up as fast as others were cut down: it was flaming bottles of gasoline against armour and big guns,’ wrote Cavendish in his despatch as the guns opened up on the city.120
As he listened to the news of the Soviet tanks entering the city, James McCargar was in a Viennese hotel room. ‘My anger was vented on the British and French, whose adventure at Suez I wildly blamed for giving the Russians the pretext for the action in Hungary,’ recalled McCargar. All the ‘political warfare’ and propaganda had led the Hungarians to believe they would not stand alone. They were wrong. There were no plans. There was no help. The Soviets had shown they were willing to use overwhelming force to maintain control of their European satellites and that the attempts to prise them away – whether through covert action or through supporting resistance groups – were likely to lead to nothing.121 Roll-back was dead.
In London, George Kennedy Young was also angry at a betrayal by an ally. ‘Although for ten years the United States government had always hoped for, even where it had not tried to propagate, a spirit of active resistance to Communism behind the Iron Curtain, when the moment came it was not prepared to lift a finger,’ he wrote a few years later, perhaps overlooking the fact that lifting a finger over Hungary might have meant Armageddon. He also railed against America’s lack of support over Suez. ‘When its own Allies acted in pursuance of what they believed to be their national interests, the United States government took the lead in preventing them.’122
Britain had continued to live and labour under the illusion that it was still a great power. Suez exposed the truth. After the initial flare of miserable anti-Americanism had subsided, some would look to a close relationship with Washington to exercise influence and power, wherever that took them; others looked to Europe. But no longer could it be done alone. The relationship with the US would never be quite the same again. It was clear who was in charge. Eden emerged broken, his eyes staring vacantly, his hands twitching and his face grey. In a piece of sublime irony, he set off for Jamaica to recuperate at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s simple, shuttered, cliff-top home where the former Naval Intelligence man was writing the James Bond books, his own antidote to the reality of post-imperial decline. Eden and Fleming may not have been amused if they had known that the Egyptian intelligence service bought up copies of the Bond books for their training courses.123
The deaths in Budapest put paid to the idea that, with Stalin gone, the Soviet Union had fundamentally changed. It helped undermine much of the international appeal of Soviet Communism and there was disillusion from within as well, including for KGB officer Anatoly Golitsyn. The Hungarian uprising was, he claimed, the moment when he understood that the system could not be reformed.124 Philby in Beirut watched the events faraway in Hungary and closer by in Egypt with a detached air. At the time he was going through one of his phases of feeling rather lost. His betrayals had left him in a strange halfway place between his two lives. His trail of personal devastation continued to grow. His second wife Aileen, who was back in Britain, had been self-harming for some time as her marriage disintegrated and perhaps also as she suspected her husband’s dark secret. In Beirut, he received a telegram informing him of her death, news which caused him no distress. By then he had moved on. Just six weeks before Suez, he had been in the crowded bar of the St George’s Hotel when he met Eleanor Brewer, the wife of the New York Times correspondent. He began to escort her around the souks and cafés and she left her husband. Before long Philby went to tell her ex-husband that he planned to marry Eleanor. ‘That sounds like the best possible solution,’ Brewer said. ‘What do you make of the situation in Iraq?’ he added, returning to the political issue of the day.125 By 1959, Philby and Eleanor were living in a fifth-floor apartment full of her sculptures and his trinkets collected on travels around the region. For most who betray, falling in love is a risk, a vulnerability. But, after Litzi, Philby always managed to separate out his lives and Eleanor saw only the smile, never suspecting what it masked.
After Budapest, Anthony Cavendish went on to Beirut in the late 1950s with UPI, working from the top floor of a seafront hotel. There he filed despatches on bloody gun battles, lounging by the pool with a telephone cable stretched out to the side and a tray carrying beer next to him.126 Every now and again he would have a ‘drink or ten’ with Philby for old times’ sake at one of the hotel bars. Drinks would stretch on into the afternoon with Philby showing no ill effects. He never lost control or gave himself away no matter how much he consumed. Despite the accusations against him, Cavendish thought it was right to give his old colleague the benefit of the doubt. ‘I thought he was a charming and excellent man and never had the least thought of him turning out to be what he turned out to be,’ he recalled. ‘I suppose I thought he must be very clever and we were very stupid.’127
At a Beirut restaurant in 1960, things began to look up for Philby. Nicholas Elliott had arrived as the new MI6 station chief and their friendship resumed and with it Philby’s usefulness to the Soviets.128 He also kept close to the CIA officers. ‘Philby was friendly with all the Yanks in Beirut. A lot of them blabbed. He was pretty good at getting them to talk,’ said George Kennedy Young, focusing on others’ failings rather than his service’s own.129 Philby was still part of the old gang and the source of much interest. When Ian Fleming passed through town later that year, he too dined with his old chum Elliott, and the conversation inevitably turned to Philby.130
Philby’s father St John had settled in a simple stone house outside Beirut near the mountains, allowing the father and son’s strange relationship to resume. Philby looked up to him but never seemed too close and would sometimes blame his stutter on his father for unspecified reasons. The father had, though, impressed on his son the need to have the guts to go through with what one believed whatever others thought, a lesson the son certainly learnt.131 Philby senior gave a speech at the American Women’s Club in the city and told the audience the Americans had ruined Arabia. ‘And who brought the Americans to Arabia?’ he asked. He paused and then, full of contradictions to the end, said ‘I did.’132
Elliott had lunch with both Philbys one day. St John was agreeable company. ‘He left at tea time, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of Embassy staff in a nightclub, had a heart attack and died early next morning. His last words were, “Take me away, I’m bored here.’”133 Philby junior went out of circulation for days afterwards. As 1962 progressed, Eleanor began to sense a change. The drinking was getting heavier with an edge of desperation, a desire to escape. When a pet fox he kept on his balcony was fou
nd dead, Philby plunged into a strange depression. On New Year’s Eve he smashed his head against a radiator in a bathroom, leaving himself splattered with blood. A doctor said any more booze might have killed him that night. The denouement approached.
Elliott returned to Beirut for a very different kind of visit in January 1963. He had finished his time as head of station just three months earlier and been replaced by Peter Lunn, formerly of Vienna. Elliott was there to see Philby once more but no longer as his protector. Anatoly Golitsyn had defected from the KGB and had brought with him talk of a ‘ring of five’. Arthur Martin had pulled together enough to convince Dick White, who already believed Philby was guilty, that the saga had gone on long enough. Arthur Martin was originally the man who was to be sent out but at the last minute Elliott took his place. The belief was that an old friend would be more likely to secure the deal that White had in mind. Remarkably, White felt he had to lie to Elliott to convince him of his friend’s guilt by saying a KGB source had confirmed the exact identity of the traitor, which was not strictly true.134
Lunn telephoned Philby and asked him over to a flat which had been wired up for the occasion. Philby arrived at four in the afternoon still bandaged from his drunken fall. He walked in to find his old friend. Elliott got up from a chair.
‘I rather thought it would be you,’ said Philby. The meaning of these words would be the source of much pain for the British Secret Service.
‘I’ll get right to the point. Unfortunately it’s not very pleasant,’ said Elliott. ‘I came to tell you that your past has caught up with you.’ Philby laughed. ‘Have you all gone mad once again?’ he said. ‘You want to start all that? After all these years? You’ve lost your sense of humour! You’ll be a laughing-stock!’
‘No, we haven’t lost anything,’ Elliott responded. ‘On the contrary. We’ve found additional information about you. And it puts everything in place.’
‘What information? And what is there to put in place?’
Elliott stood up, paced the room, went to the window and looked out. Without turning, he said: ‘Listen, Kim, you know I was on your side all the time from the moment there were suspicions about you. But now there is new information. They’ve shown it to me. And now even I am convinced, absolutely convinced that you worked for the Soviet intelligence services. You worked for them right up until ’49.’135
Philby did not know what the new information was but would have suspected it was a defector. He knew they had something. But not everything. Why 1949? he might have wondered. So would others later, and some of those would suspect that this was a convenient way for his old friends to signal to Philby that he needed to confess only to crimes committed before he went to Washington that year, in order to keep him out of the clutches of the FBI. Of the Cambridge Five, Philby was the most hard headed, the one who never cracked under pressure, who found deception came easy to the end. It was not over yet.
‘You stopped working for them in 1949, I’m absolutely certain of that,’ Elliott explained. ‘I can understand people who worked for the Soviet Union, say before or during the war. But by 1949, a man of your intellect and spirit had to see that all the rumours about Stalin’s monstrous behaviour were not rumours, they were the truth … you decided to break with the USSR … Therefore I can give you my word, and that of Dick White, that you will get full immunity, you will be pardoned, but only if you tell it yourself. We need your collaboration, your help.’136 As Philby prepared to walk out, Elliott added, ‘I’m offering you a lifeline, Kim.’ There was another line which Elliott later recalled saying but which Philby never recounted when he talked of the meeting, perhaps because it cut a little too close to the bone: ‘I once looked up to you, Kim. My God, how I despise you now. I hope you have enough decency left to understand why.’ Elliott told him they would meet again the following day. The whole encounter lasted about five minutes. Once he had left, Elliott told Lunn, ‘Kim’s broken. Everything’s OK.’
Philby went back the next day and began to talk. He talked for two hours, saying he had worked for the Soviets until 1946 and had only tipped off Maclean as a friend in 1951. Elliott believed Philby had cracked. But he was still playing the game. Philby went back home and had a whole bottle of whisky. Elliott left for the Congo. Lunn, it was agreed, would take over and finish off the debrief.
In London, the initial ‘confession’ led to confidence that it would all be wrapped up soon. Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, wrote to Hoover at the FBI to say there was no evidence that Philby had worked for the Russians after 1946. ‘If this is so, it follows that damage to the United States will have been confined to the period of the Second World War,’ he explained, with more than a hint of pleading.137 But after his meeting with Elliott, Philby had gone to his balcony to signal to his Soviet contact in Beirut – he held a book rather than a newspaper to indicate that it was urgent.138 ‘I think your time has come,’ his contact told him. ‘There’s room for you in Moscow.’
On Wednesday, 23 January 1963, Kim and Eleanor Philby were due to go round to friends from the British Embassy for dinner. A violent storm had swept into Beirut and late in the afternoon Philby took his raincoat and told his wife he had a meeting and would be back at six in time for the party. An hour later, one of his boys told Eleanor that Philby had called to say he would meet her at the party. So she went alone, apologising for her husband’s lateness and promising he would be there soon. The hours passed, and eventually everyone agreed to eat without him. Eleanor headed home through the storm, waves breaking against the corniche. At midnight, she called Peter Lunn. He was not there. Philby had been due to meet him and, when he failed to turn up, Lunn had gone straight to the Embassy, panic mingling with despair. Eleanor passed a message to Lunn’s wife and ten minutes later Lunn called. ‘Would you like me to come round?’
‘I would be most grateful,’ she said.139
She asked whether they should check the hospitals, fearing a car accident. She also suggested that perhaps he had gone off on a ‘lost weekend’ as he sometimes was wont to do. Lunn already feared a far worse truth and asked if anything was missing. Frantic search parties were sent out. It did not take long for him to realise that it was too late. As the sun rose over the mountains Eleanor knew he had gone. It was their wedding anniversary.
Elliott was about to cross the Congo River when he got the message and rushed back. Philby had the last laugh on the bungling Elliott in Beirut, the last laugh on the British ruling class and its old-fashioned notions of friendship and how ‘gentlemen’ behaved. He had left Beirut on a freighter and eventually arrived before dawn at a small Soviet frontier post. There were a few tables and chairs and a charcoal stove. Soldiers were brewing tea on the stove and the air was thick with cigarette smoke, he later recalled.140 One man was waiting for him and in English said, ‘Kim, your mission is concluded.’
Despite never having known or suspected he was a spy, Eleanor followed him in September to Moscow. ‘He betrayed many people, me among them. But men are not always masters of their fate,’ she wrote a few years later when it had all fallen apart and she had returned home. ‘Kim had the guts, or the weakness, to stand by a decision made thirty years ago, whatever the cost to those who loved him most, and to whom he was deeply attached.’141 It was a view echoed by the man himself. ‘I have always operated at two levels, a personal level and a political one,’ he later reflected.142 ‘When the two have come in conflict I have had to put politics first. This conflict can be very painful. I don’t like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it. But then decent soldiers feel badly about the necessity of killing in wartime.’
‘What a shame we reopened it all. Just trouble,’ White told Elliott.143 Some MI6 officers – and Philby himself – wondered if he had been allowed to flee to avoid the embarrassment of a trial at a time when the government was already reeling from a torrent of spy scandals, including in the Admiralty and MI6 itself.144 A few came to believ
e that Philby had been tipped off by a mole within MI5. Most believe that, lacking evidence that could be presented in court, MI6 was hoping an old friend could be used to draw him home and find a quiet way of dealing with this through the exchange of immunity for information. That way no one would be embarrassed. Even when Philby had fled to Moscow, his old colleagues believed he must surely be a double agent ‘run by a most secret section’ within MI6. Or had he been bundled at gunpoint on to the ship? And everyone was asking: if Philby, then who else?145 Arthur Martin at MI5 was furious. He had been supposed to go to Beirut to confront Philby using the evidence he had painstakingly built up. But ‘they’ had chosen one of their own instead, foolishly hoping to play on any vestiges of friendship that Elliott’s presence could muster. Even the tapes were flawed because Lunn and Elliott had left the windows open, allowing traffic noises to drown out some of Philby’s precious words. Typical MI6 amateurishness, Martin fumed, as he screwed up his eyes and pounded his knees with frustration, listening to what was left. ‘It was no contest,’ a colleague of Martin said when he listened to Elliott take on Philby. ‘By the end they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public-school accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century.’146
The heyday for the ‘wildmen’ and the old timers was coming to an end. The old Russia hands were moved on through the 1950s. Harry Carr was sidelined after the Baltic disasters had been exposed and he left MI6 in 1961. At the end of his days, listening to Russian folk songs, he would blame Philby for everything. George Kennedy Young headed for the City the same year that Carr left and continued a long drift first to the right and then beyond to the political fringes, railing against the way in which non-white immigration was endangering Britain while the failure to check left-wing subversion was destroying it from within. When there were whispers in the 1970s of individuals with close connections to MI6 plotting a coup to overthrow the British government, it was Young whom they were talking about. In Washington, Frank Wisner went mad, literally. He was given electroshock therapy for six months in 1958 before being ‘cured’ and sent as station chief to London. Four years later he relapsed, and in 1965 he put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.147 Philby’s friend and drinking buddy in Washington, James Jesus Angleton, also went mad, but in a different way. He saw himself as Machiavelli. Yet he had been fooled. His colleagues were sure he must have woken in the night remembering yet another secret he had shared with Philby over a Martini. The result in Angleton’s mind was a paranoia about the Soviets and their deviousness, which when allied to the ideas of the KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn would take the CIA and MI6 into a dark place.
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