A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  If the prospect of Burgess arriving in Washington worried some officials, it positively horrified Aileen. Philby insisted, however, that his old friend must be made welcome, and could live in the basement of their house. Aileen protested, and a furious row followed, duly reported back, by both parties, to Elliott in Switzerland, who wrote: ‘Knowing the trouble that would inevitably ensue – and remembering Burgess’s drunken and homosexual orgies when he had stayed with them in Istanbul – Aileen resisted this move, but bowed in the end (and as usual) to Philby’s wishes.’ Burgess hit the US capital, and the Philby household, like a particularly destructive and volatile meteor. ‘The inevitable drunken scenes and disorder ensued,’ Elliott wrote, ‘and tested the marriage to its limits.’

  Philby later depicted his decision to take in Burgess as an act of loyalty. They had been friends for more than twenty years, they had discovered communism together and remained locked in service to Moscow. Burgess was one of the few people to whom Philby could speak openly. He assured the embassy that he would ‘keep an eye’ on the renegade – a task that was virtually impossible anyway, but perhaps marginally easier with the man living under his roof. Philby had his own motive for welcoming Burgess to Washington. As information officer, Burgess would be able to travel freely without exciting comment; he could therefore act as a courier, taking information to Philby’s Soviet controller, Valeri Makayev, in New York. Soon after Burgess’s arrival, Philby told him about the hunt for ‘Homer’, and the increasing risk that Maclean might be exposed and confess all, with potentially calamitous consequences.

  Philby had not seen Maclean since the end of the war, but their early friendship would not be hard to prove; Burgess knew Maclean much better, and was also a close friend of Anthony Blunt; the association between Burgess and Philby was evident; Blunt was also in touch with Maclean. If Maclean cracked, MI5 could swiftly establish the links between the spies, and the chain of suspicion would eventually lead to Philby.

  Maclean was heading off the rails at fantastic speed. He had tried to persuade his Soviet handler that he no longer wished to be a Soviet spy, apparently unaware that this was not the sort of club one could resign from. Moscow simply ignored the request. In May 1950, the strain became too much for him: he got drunk, smashed up the Cairo flat of two secretaries at the US embassy, ripped up their underwear, and hurled a large mirror off the wall, breaking a large bath in two. He was sent home, placed under the care of a Harley Street psychiatrist, and then, amazingly, after a short period of treatment, promoted to head the American desk at the Foreign Office. Even drunken, unhinged knicker-shredding, it seemed, was no bar to advancement in the British diplomatic service if one was the ‘right sort’. But the shortlist of suspects was getting shorter, and Maclean’s name was on it. He was plainly on the verge of complete nervous collapse. If MI5 pulled him in for questioning, he was almost certain to crack. With Burgess as his go-between, Philby could now be sure of a ‘secure line of communication to Moscow’ if and when the crisis erupted.

  Once installed in the Philby home, Burgess began to behave entirely in character. He crashed around Washington, dropping names, picking quarrels, downing numberless drinks, and leaving others to pay for them. He wore a filthy old duffel coat, eschewed soap, and loudly declared that Americans were incapable of intellectual thought. Philby introduced Burgess to Angleton as ‘the most outstanding historian of his time at Cambridge’. (Anyone familiar with Cambridge historians can attest that Burgess’s personal habits did not entirely negate that claim.) He was certainly outstandingly embarrassing. Some days later, Burgess lurched up to Angleton’s table at the Occidental Restaurant, sat down without invitation, and demanded a drink of ‘the cheapest bourbon’. He was wearing ‘a peculiar garb, namely a white British naval jacket which was dirty and stained. He was intoxicated, unshaven, and, by the appearance of his eyes, had not washed since he last slept.’ Burgess launched into a description of a mad scheme to import jackets like the one he was wearing to sell ‘for fantastic profits’ in New York. Then he demanded to be taken for a ride in Angleton’s Oldsmobile saloon, and finally asked the CIA officer to lend him some cash. Then he wandered off. There is no evidence Angleton found this behaviour objectionable. He liked British eccentrics, and any friend of Kim Philby was a friend of his.

  On 19 January 1951, Philby made a fateful decision: with his wife depressed, his dangerous friend careening around Washington, and his own future uncertain, he decided to throw a dinner party. It was, by almost universal agreement, the dinner party from hell.

  Philby invited all his senior contacts in American intelligence: the Angletons, of course, and Robert Lamphere, the FBI mole-hunter, along with the Manns and several others. Also present were Bill Harvey, a former FBI agent now in charge of CIA counter-intelligence, and his highly strung wife Libby. A hard-driving Ohio native, Bill Harvey was intelligent but also ‘a bloated alcoholic with the manners of a comically corrupt cop in a Raymond Chandler thriller’. The Harveys had already attended a dinner party chez Philby, which had ended with Bill Harvey slumped insensible at the table.

  The evening began, as always, with Martinis served from a pitcher. There was an acrid mood in the air. Cicely Angleton noticed that Bob Lamphere was the only guest not smoking. ‘What Freudian impulse causes you not to smoke?’ she demanded archly. The drinking continued steadily, and in the case of Libby Harvey, unsteadily. With the meal over (no one could later recall what was said, or eaten), the guests moved on to whisky. At this point Burgess burst in. He was dishevelled, loudly inebriated, and itching for an argument. Libby lurched up to the new arrival, cornered him, and demanded that he draw a cartoon of her. Burgess was a talented sketcher, and his caricatures had become objects of admiration on the Washington dinner-party circuit. Burgess demurred. Libby drunkenly insisted. Finally, fed up with her badgering, he picked up a pad and pencil, and began to sketch. A few minutes later, with a glinting grin, he handed over the caricature.

  Sadly, the finished artwork does not survive, but its broad outlines have been described by witnesses. The woman in the picture was unmistakably Libby Harvey, though her face was ‘beastily distorted’. Her face, however, was not the main focus of the cartoon: her dress was hiked up around her waist, her legs spread, and her naked pudenda bared. Libby stared at it, shrieked, and burst into tears. Bill Harvey threw a punch at Burgess. Uproar ensued. The Harveys stormed out.

  Burgess found the incident hilarious. Philby did not. ‘How could you? How could you?’ he demanded, before slumping on the sofa. Aileen retired sobbing to the kitchen. Before drifting home, Angleton and Mann lingered outside 4100 Nebraska Avenue, like two teenagers after a fight, discussing what Angleton termed ‘a social disaster’.

  Philby later sent the Harveys a ‘handsome’ apology for Burgess’s insulting behaviour.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Bill Harvey, charmlessly. But Harvey didn’t forget it.

  A few weeks later, at Arlington Hall, came the break the decoders had been hoping for, and Philby had been dreading: Meredith Gardner finally decrypted a message dating back to June 1944, indicating that the spy ‘Homer’ had a pregnant wife who was then staying with her mother in New York. Melinda, Maclean’s American-born wife, had been expecting a child in 1944; her wealthy divorced mother lived in Manhattan; therefore Homer must be Donald Maclean.

  News of the breakthrough flew to London, and then bounced back to Philby in Washington. He was now the closest to exposure since Volkov had threatened to unmask him in 1945. But time was on his side. There was no evidence, as yet, to connect him directly with Maclean, and the two men had not met for many years. Moreover, instead of arresting Maclean at once, MI5 opted to wait, and watch, in the hope of gathering further evidence. The Venona material was simply too secret to be used in court: by tapping his telephone, bugging his office, intercepting his post and putting him under surveillance, MI5 hoped to catch Maclean in direct contact with his Soviet controller. But the Security Service may also have been suffe
ring from the sort of paralysis that affects organisations when faced with a situation that is deeply embarrassing, potentially ruinous and entirely unprecedented. Maclean, the most senior spy ever detected inside the British government, would remain at liberty for five more weeks.

  Philby immediately relayed the bad news to Makayev, and demanded that Maclean be extracted from the UK before he was interrogated and compromised the entire British spy network – and most importantly Philby himself. But with Maclean now under close surveillance, arranging his escape was a delicate task, since any overt contact with the Soviets would trigger his immediate arrest. Maclean must be warned and told to flee by a third party who would not arouse suspicion. The ideal messenger, Philby concluded, was close at hand, in the disreputable and dishevelled shape of Guy Burgess, whose diplomatic career was about to come to an end in a car crash, almost literally. Whether by accident or design, he collected no fewer than three speeding tickets in a single day by hurtling around Virginia in a grey Lincoln convertible, claimed diplomatic immunity on all of them, insulted the officers who stopped him, and provoked a furious official protest from both the State Department and the governor of Virginia. It wasn’t quite goats, but for the ambassador it was the last straw. Burgess, in disgrace but wholly unrepentant, was instructed to return to London immediately. Philby would later claim that Burgess’s recall had been a carefully engineered ploy; it was probably more a lucky accident, but either way it presented an ideal opportunity to warn Maclean that he must flee to Moscow.

  The night before Burgess’s departure, the two spies dined in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Washington, selected because it had individual booths with piped music, to stymie any eavesdroppers. They rehearsed the plan: Burgess would make contact with the Soviets in London, then visit Maclean at his office and, while making innocuous conversation, hand over a sheet of paper setting the time and place for a rendezvous. Burgess had not yet been formally fired, and there would be nothing suspicious in the newly returned information officer from Washington reporting to the head of the American desk. The Soviets would then arrange Maclean’s escape. ‘Don’t you go too,’ said Philby, only half-joking, as he dropped Burgess off at Union Station. Burgess, however, was congenitally incapable of doing what he was told.

  Burgess arrived back in England on 7 May 1951, and immediately contacted Anthony Blunt, who got a message to Yuri Modin, the Soviet controller of the Cambridge ring. ‘There’s serious trouble,’ Blunt reported. ‘Guy Burgess has just arrived back in London. Homer’s about to be arrested . . . It’s only a question of days now, maybe hours . . . Donald’s now in such a state that I’m convinced he’ll break down the moment they arrest him.’ Modin informed Moscow, and received an immediate response: ‘We agree to your organising Maclean’s defection. We will receive him here and provide him with whatever he needs.’

  A graduate of the Leningrad Naval Academy, Yuri Modin had, in his own estimation, ‘no predisposition to be a spy’. But he was very good at it. He had inherited the Cambridge network at a time when it was falling apart, yet he had handled Burgess’s drinking and Maclean’s volatility with tact and competence. Spiriting Maclean to Moscow, however, was by far the greatest challenge he had yet faced.

  MI5’s surveillance unit, A4, was known as ‘The Watchers’. In 1951, it numbered about twenty men and three women. Most were former Special Branch police officers, selected for their sharp eyesight, good hearing, and average height (‘men who are too short . . . are just as conspicuous as tall men’, ruled the chief Watcher). They were expected to dress in trilby hats and raincoats, and communicated with each other by hand signals. They stood on street corners, watching, and trying to appear inconspicuous. They looked, in short, exactly like surveillance agents. Since the end of the war, A4 had kept watch on the Soviet intelligence residency in Kensington Palace Gardens, and the Soviets, in turn, had kept a close watch on them. Modin knew that the Watchers did not work in the evenings or over the weekends. He knew, too, that surveillance of Maclean did not extend beyond London, because MI5 feared that a man hanging around in a trilby might be a giveaway in the countryside. Maclean lived in Tatsfield in rural Kent, and commuted to and from London by train. The Watchers trailed after him during the day but, Modin observed, ‘at Victoria, MI5’s men saw the train out of the station, and then headed home like good little functionaries. There was no one at Tatsfield to take up the chase.’ Modin believed Maclean would be arrested on Monday 28 May. On Friday 25 May, the very day the Foreign Secretary gave formal approval for Maclean’s interrogation, the escape plan swung into action.

  That evening, which happened to be Maclean’s thirty-eighth birthday, Burgess appeared at the Maclean home in Tatsfield with a rented car, packed bags and two round-trip tickets booked in false names for the Falaise, a pleasure boat leaving that night for St Malo in France. He had spent the previous day at his club, talking loudly about a road trip he planned to take to Scotland with a new boyfriend. Burgess had dinner with Donald and Melinda Maclean (who was party to the plan), and the two men set off for Southampton in a state of high excitement and unaccustomed sobriety. They arrived just minutes before the midnight sailing, parked the car askew on the dockside, and scrambled up the boat’s gangplank. One of the dockworkers shouted that the car door was still open; ‘Back on Monday!’ Burgess shouted back. He may have thought he was telling the truth.

  Before Burgess left Washington, Philby had made him promise he would not flee with Maclean to Moscow. ‘Don’t go with him when he goes. If you do, that’ll be the end of me. Swear that you won’t.’ Modin, however, had insisted that Burgess must accompany Maclean. Burgess at first objected. He pointed out that he had no desire to defect and found the prospect of life in Moscow perfectly ghastly. But finally he had agreed, apparently on the understanding that he could steer Maclean to Moscow and then return and resume his life just as before. The Soviets had other plans: Burgess and Maclean were travelling on one-way tickets. As Modin wrote: ‘The Centre had concluded that we had not one, but two burnt-out agents on our hands. Burgess had lost most of his former value to us . . . Even if he retained his job, he could never again feed intelligence to the KGB as he had done before. He was finished.’ What the Soviets had failed to take properly into account was the knock-on impact the double defection would have on Kim Philby. Modin later acknowledged that allowing Burgess to leave with Maclean had been an error. In the spy world, nothing is supposed to occur by accident, but in this case, Modin’s explanation was probably true: ‘It just happened . . . intelligence services do silly things sometimes.’

  The Falaise was popular with wealthy adulterers wanting to take their mistresses on a weekend cross-Channel jaunt. There were no passport controls, and few questions asked. In theory the ship cruised off the coast of France, but unofficially she always put in at St Malo for a few hours of French food and sightseeing. The ship docked at 11.45 the next morning. Burgess and Maclean left their luggage on board, filed down the gangplank with the other passengers, and then slipped away from the crowds. They caught a taxi to the station at Rennes, a train to Paris, and then another train to Berne in Switzerland, where Nicholas Elliott, wholly unaware of the presence of the two fugitives on his patch, was enjoying dinner at the Schweizerhof Hotel.

  Elliott considered the hotel restaurant one of the finest in Europe, with particularly good foie gras. ‘I have never tasted better,’ Elliott insisted, ‘even in Strasbourg.’ The maître d’, Théo, was one of Elliott’s paid informants, and always managed to find him a table. Saturday night dinner at the Schweizerhof had become something of an Elliott tradition.

  On the evening of 26 May, while Elliott was tucking into his foie gras, a taxi pulled up outside the Soviet embassy, less than a mile away. Elliott would have recognised both passengers. Burgess had been a frequent guest at the Harris parties, and he, Philby and Elliott had often dined together at Pruniers restaurant on Piccadilly. Burgess had once applied for a teaching post at Eton, but was turned down when C
laude Elliott discovered how unsuitable he was. ‘It seems a pity the Foreign Office did not take the trouble to make a similar inquiry,’ Elliott later reflected ruefully. He had also met Maclean on several occasions.

  A few hours later, Burgess and Maclean re-emerged from the Soviet embassy carrying fake passports in false names. They then took another train to Zurich, where they boarded a plane bound for Stockholm, with a stopover in Prague. At Prague airport, now safely behind the Iron Curtain, the two men walked out of the arrivals hall and were whisked into a waiting car.