On Monday morning, the Watchers watched in vain as the train from Tatsfield pulled into Victoria Station with no Maclean aboard. A little later, Melinda Maclean called the Foreign Office to report that her husband had left the house on Friday night with a man named ‘Roger Styles’, and she had not seen him since. The Foreign Office put a call through to MI5. Special Branch reported that a car, hired by Guy Burgess, had been abandoned at Southampton docks. A flush of dawning horror began to spread across the British government.
The Foreign Office sent out an urgent telegram to embassies and MI6 stations throughout Europe, with instructions that Burgess and Maclean be apprehended ‘at all costs and by all means’. A Missing Persons poster gave a description of the fugitives. ‘Maclean: 6’3”, normal build, short hair, brushed back, part on left side, slight stoop, thin tight lips, long thin legs, sloppy dressed, chain smoker, heavy drinker. Burgess: 5’9”, slender build, dark complexion, dark curly hair, tinged with grey, chubby face, clean shaven, slightly pigeon-toed’. In Berne, Elliott gave orders to his own Watchers to keep a careful eye on the Soviet embassy. One of his colleagues prepared a ‘decanter of poisoned Scotch’, just in case the notoriously thirsty fugitives turned up and needed to be immobilised. By that time, Burgess and Maclean were already being toasted in Moscow.
The morning after the discovery of Burgess and Maclean’s disappearance, a long, coded telegram arrived at the British embassy in Washington, marked Top Secret. Geoffrey Paterson, the MI5 representative in Washington, called Kim Philby at home to ask if he could borrow his secretary, Edith Whitfield, to help decipher it. Philby was happy to oblige. A few hours later, he found Paterson in his embassy office, grey-faced.
‘Kim,’ Paterson half-whispered. ‘The bird has flown.’
‘What bird?’ said Philby, arranging his features to register the appropriate consternation. ‘Not Maclean?’
‘Yes, but there’s worse than that . . . Guy Burgess has gone with him.’
Philby’s alarm was now unfeigned. Burgess had been his houseguest until a few weeks earlier. Philby was one of the few people apprised of the Homer investigation, and in a position to warn Maclean. All three had been at Cambridge together. It was only a matter of time – and probably very little time – before MI5 took an interest in his friendship with Burgess, and started digging into his past. Philby realised, as his Soviet handlers apparently did not, just how seriously Burgess’s flight would threaten his own position. He might be placed under surveillance at any moment, sacked, or even arrested. He had to move fast.
An emergency plan was already in place. If MI5 seemed to be closing in, the Soviets would provide money and false papers, and Philby would escape to Moscow via the Caribbean or Mexico. Makayev in New York had been instructed to leave $2,000 and a message at a dead letter drop for precisely this purpose. He failed to do so. Philby never received the money. Makayev was later disciplined for this failure by his superiors in Moscow, who noted his ‘lack of discipline’ and ‘crude manners’: it seems likely that he simply spent the money on his ballet dancer.
The British embassy was in secret uproar, as news spread that not one, but two senior Foreign Office officials in Washington had vanished, and were probably Soviet spies. Philby and Paterson together broke the embarrassing news to the FBI. Philby carefully observed the reaction of his FBI friends, including Bob Lamphere, his former dinner party guest, and saw only surprise, tinged with some wry pleasure at the British predicament. So far, Philby himself did not seem to be under suspicion. At lunchtime, Philby told Paterson he was going home for ‘a stiff drink’, behaviour that anyone who knew him would have considered perfectly normal. Back at Nebraska Avenue, Philby headed not for the drinks cabinet but for the potting shed, where he collected a trowel, and then down to the basement that had, until recently, housed Guy Burgess. There he retrieved from a hiding place the Russian camera, tripod and film given to him by Makayev, sealed the lot in waterproof containers and placed them in the boot of his car. Then he climbed in, gunned the engine, and drove north. Aileen was at home with the children; if she thought it strange that her husband should come home from work early, lock himself in the basement, and then drive away without a word, she did not say so.
Philby had travelled the road to Great Falls many times. Angleton had taken him fishing in the Potomac Valley and there was a faux-English pub called the Old Angler’s Inn where they had spent several convivial evenings. The road was little used, and heavily wooded. On a deserted stretch, with woods on one side and the river on the other, Philby parked, extracted the containers and trowel, and headed into the trees. He emerged after a few minutes, casually doing up his fly buttons for the benefit of any passers-by, and drove home. Somewhere in a shallow hole in the woods beside the Potomac lies a cache of Soviet photographic equipment that has lain buried for more than sixty years, a secret memorial to Philby’s spycraft.
If Philby was going to make his escape, and join Burgess and Maclean in exile, then now was the moment. But he did not run. He decided to stay and try to bluff it out. Philby later framed this choice (as he interpreted most of his own behaviour) in terms of principle: ‘My clear duty was to fight it out.’ But the decision was also calculated: the FBI did not yet suspect him, so presumably the same must be true of MI5. No one had identified ‘Stanley’. If and when they explored his past, the evidence they might find was mostly circumstantial. His early dabblings with left-wing politics were hardly secret, and he had told Valentine Vivian of his marriage to Litzi. His friendship with Burgess looked bad (back in 1940, Burgess had been instrumental in his recruitment by MI6), but then if they were really both Soviet spies, why would Philby have allowed Burgess to live in his home? ‘There is no doubt that Kim Philby is thoroughly disgusted with Burgess’s behaviour,’ wrote Liddell, after Philby contacted him to express horror at his friend’s defection.
The very act of staying put would suggest a clear conscience. True, there were some uncomfortable early clues to his real allegiance: the British spy described by the defector Krivitsky who had worked in Spain as a journalist; Volkov’s allusion to a counter-intelligence officer, and the Russian’s subsequent disappearance after Philby took over the case. Going back still further, MI6 might recall the Soviet files he had taken out from the registry at St Albans. But for a legal prosecution, MI5 would need harder evidence than this. They might suspect him, interrogate him, urge him to confess, and try to trap him. But they would find it very hard to convict him. And Philby knew it. With a cool head, and the luck that seemed to cling to him, he might yet ride out the coming storm. ‘Despite all appearances, I thought my chances were good.’
Philby had one other weapon in his armoury, perhaps the most powerful of all, and that was his capacity for friendship. Philby had powerful friends on both sides of the Atlantic, people who had worked with him and trusted him for many years. These people had witnessed his skill as an intelligence officer, shared secrets with him and drunk his Martinis. To accept Philby’s guilt would have been, in a way, to implicate themselves. ‘There must be many people in high positions,’ Philby reflected, ‘who would wish very much to see my innocence established. They would be inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt.’
Philby knew he could rely on his friends to defend him, and two above all: Jim Angleton and Nick Elliott.
See Notes on Chapter 10
11
Peach
Philby’s summons to London arrived in the form of a polite, handwritten note from his immediate superior, Jack Easton, informing him that he would shortly receive a formal telegram inviting him to come home and discuss the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Easton was one of the very few senior officers Philby respected, a man with a ‘rapier mind’, capable of ‘deeply subtle twists’. Philby later wondered if the letter was a tipoff, intended to make him flee in order to avoid a scandal. In truth it was probably just a friendly gesture, a reassurance that there was nothing to worry about. Before leaving, Philby made the rou
nds of his CIA and FBI contacts once more, and again detected no overt suspicion. Angleton seemed as friendly as ever. On 11 June 1951, the evening before Philby’s flight, the friends met in a bar.
‘How long will you be away?’ Angleton inquired.
‘About a week,’ said Philby nonchalantly.
‘Can you do me a favour in London?’ asked Angleton, explaining that he needed to send an urgent letter to MI6, but had missed the diplomatic bag that week. Would Philby deliver it by hand? He pushed over an envelope, addressed to the head of counter-intelligence in London. Philby later imagined that this too had been a ruse of some sort, intended to test or trap him. Paranoia was beginning to gnaw. Angleton had no inkling of suspicion: his trusted friend would deliver the letter, and return in a week, when they would have lunch together as usual, at Harvey’s. After what Philby called ‘a pleasant hour’ at the bar, discussing ‘matters of mutual concern’, Philby boarded the night plane to London. He would never see America, or Jim Angleton, again.
Dark clouds of doubt were swiftly gathering, on both sides of the Atlantic, as Philby knew they would. These would soon blow up into a storm that would knock the ‘special relationship’ off course and set Britain’s secret services at each other’s throats. The Americans might appear unruffled, but the disappearing diplomats had provoked a ‘major sensation’ in Washington. An investigation was now under way focusing on Guy Burgess and, by association, his friend, protector and landlord, Kim Philby. CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith ordered any officers with knowledge of the British pair to relate what they knew of Philby and Burgess as a matter of urgency. The first report to arrive on the CIA chief’s desk came from Bill Harvey of counter-intelligence; the second, arriving a few days later, was written by James Angleton. They were markedly different documents.
Harvey’s report – ‘highly professional, perceptive and accusatory’ – was, in effect, a denunciation of Philby. The former FBI agent would later claim to have had his suspicions about Philby long before the Burgess and Maclean defections, and at the FBI he may have had access to the Venona material. Harvey had studied the Englishman’s career with meticulous care, and he drew together the strands of evidence with devastating precision over five closely typed pages: he noted Philby’s links with Burgess, his part in the Volkov affair, his involvement in the doomed Albanian operations, and his intimate knowledge of the hunt for the spy ‘Homer’, which had placed him in an ideal position to warn Maclean of his impending arrest. None of these alone amounted to proof of guilt, but taken together, Harvey argued, they pointed to only one conclusion: ‘Philby was a Soviet spy.’ Philby later described Harvey’s condemnation as ‘a retrospective exercise in spite’, personal revenge for the offence given to his wife at Philby’s disastrous dinner party just six months earlier.
The second report stood in stark contrast. Angleton described his various meetings with the drunken Guy Burgess, but he noted that Philby had seemed embarrassed by his friend’s antics, and explained them away by saying that Burgess had ‘suffered severe concussion in an accident which had continued to affect him periodically’. Angleton explicitly rejected any suggestion that Philby might have been in league with the defector, and stated his ‘conviction’ that whatever crimes Burgess might have committed, he had acted ‘without reference to Philby’. As one CIA officer put it, ‘the bottom line was . . . that you couldn’t blame Philby for what this nut Burgess had done’. In Angleton’s estimation, Philby was no traitor, but an honest and brilliant man who had been cruelly duped by a friend, who in turn had been rendered mentally unstable by a nasty bump on the head. According to Angleton’s biographer, ‘he remained convinced that his British friend would be cleared of suspicion’, and warned Bedell Smith that if the CIA started levelling unsubstantiated charges of treachery against a senior MI6 officer this would seriously damage Anglo-American relations, since Philby was ‘held in high esteem’ in London.
In some ways, the two memos echoed the different approaches to intelligence that were developing on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Bill Harvey’s reflected a new, American style of investigation, suspicious, quick to judge, and willing to offend. Angleton’s was written in the British MI6 tradition, based on friendship and trust in the word of a gentleman.
Harvey read Angleton’s memo, so different in tone and import from his own, and scrawled on the bottom, ‘What is the rest of this story?’ – in effect, accusing his fellow CIA officer of turning a blind eye to the truth. The disagreement between Harvey and Angleton over Philby sparked a feud that would last the rest of their lives. A similarly stark divergence of opinion was emerging within British intelligence.
On the afternoon of 12 June, Kim Philby arrived at MI5 headquarters in Leconfield House, off Curzon Street, feeling exhausted and ‘apprehensive’, but tensed and primed for the coming duel. The adrenal rush of danger had always stimulated him. Jack Easton insisted on accompanying him to the interview, as a supportive presence. The two MI6 men were greeted by Dick White, the chief of MI5 counter-intelligence, who, over the next few hours, would subject Philby to a grilling, thinly disguised as a friendly chat. Tea was served. A fug of tobacco smoke filled the room. Civilities were exchanged. Dick White (not to be confused with Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s old friend) was a former schoolmaster, the son of a Kentish ironmonger, a frank, even-tempered and honourable man who would go on to head MI5, and then MI6. Philby had known White since the war, and had always got on well with him, while privately disparaging what he considered to be his meagre intellect and vacillating character. ‘He did his best to put our talk on a friendly footing,’ wrote Philby. The mood in the room was more embarrassed than confrontational. C had reluctantly agreed to allow one of his officers to be interviewed by MI5 on the understanding that Philby was aiding an inquiry, and ‘might have views on the case’. White was at pains to point out that Philby was there simply to help shed light on ‘this horrible business with Burgess and Maclean’. But, beneath the civilised veneer, cracks were appearing that would soon split one branch of British intelligence from the other.
MI6 was standing by its man. The files contained nothing to incriminate Philby, only accolades of mounting admiration leading up to his appointment in Washington. ‘There was no case against him at this time,’ recalled Easton. At most, he could be accused of indiscretion, for associating with a degenerate like Guy Burgess. But if that was a crime, many in the Foreign Office and secret services were equally guilty. Philby had not run away, he was happy to help, and he was, importantly, a gentleman, a clubman and a high-flier, which meant he must be innocent. Many of Philby’s colleagues in MI6 would cling to that presumption of innocence as an article of faith. To accept otherwise would be to admit that they had all been fooled; it would make the intelligence and diplomatic services look entirely idiotic. MI5, however, had been making inquiries, and already convivial, clubbable Kim Philby was beginning to take on a more sinister shape. The threads of suspicion identified by Bill Harvey in Washington were being pursued with even greater determination in London. In the weeks since the defections, a fat file had been assembled, and it now lay on White’s desk, just a few feet away from where Philby sat, sipping tea, smoking his pipe and trying to appear relaxed.
The conflicting attitudes towards Philby between the sister services of British intelligence would expose a cultural fault line that predated this crisis, long outlasted it, and persists today. MI5 and MI6 – the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, broadly equivalent to the FBI and CIA – overlapped in many respects, but were fundamentally dissimilar in outlook. MI5 tended to recruit former police officers and soldiers, men who sometimes spoke with regional accents, and frequently did not know, or care about, the right order to use the cutlery at a formal dinner. They enforced the law and defended the realm, caught spies and prosecuted them. MI6 was more public school and Oxbridge; its accent more refined, its tailoring better. Its agents and officers frequently broke the laws of other countries in pursuit
of secrets, and did so with a certain swagger. MI6 was White’s; MI5 was the Rotary Club. MI6 was upper-middle class (and sometimes aristocratic); MI5 was middle class (and sometimes working class). In the minute gradations of social stratification that meant so much in Britain, MI5 was ‘below the salt’, a little common, and MI6 was gentlemanly, elitist and old school tie. MI5 were hunters; MI6 were gatherers. Philby’s patronising dismissal of Dick White as ‘nondescript’ precisely reflected MI6’s attitude to its sister service: White, as his biographer puts it, was ‘pure trade’, whereas Philby was ‘establishment’. MI5 looked up at MI6 with resentment; MI6 looked down with a small but ill-hidden sneer. The looming battle over Philby was yet another skirmish in Britain’s never-ending, hard-fought and entirely ludicrous class war.
White was a decent man, a good administrator and an adept office politician, but he was no interrogator. The evidence against Philby was still, as he put it, ‘very sketchy’. He was also facing a spy of polished duplicity, who had hidden himself in broad daylight for nearly two decades. It would take a cleverer man than White to discover him. Philby assumed the room was bugged. His stammer gave the conversation a strange, halting quality: perhaps evidence of nerves, perhaps to buy time and sympathy. White first asked about Maclean: Philby said he remembered him from Cambridge, and knew him by reputation, but had not seen him for years and probably would not even recognise him. Then the focus turned to Burgess, and the tension in the room slid up a notch. Philby insisted it was simply unbelievable that any intelligence service, let alone the Russians, would employ someone so wholly unsuited to espionage, ‘an indiscreet, disorganised, drunken, homosexual reprobate’. Philby played his part well, with a careful combination of embarrassment, ingratiation, and self-justification: here was a senior intelligence officer defending himself against the unspoken charge that he had been fooled, and might lose his job through a disastrous friendship. The question of Philby’s own loyalty was never mentioned, never even hinted at, but it hung over the conversation like pipe smoke. The meeting broke up with amicable handshakes. Ever helpful, Philby offered to draw up a summary of the conversation, and said he could be contacted at his mother’s flat. White hinted that they would probably need to meet again soon.
A Spy Among Friends Page 18