A Spy Among Friends
Page 31
Miles Copeland was ‘dumbfounded’ by Philby’s ‘unbelievable’ defection, concluding: ‘He was the best actor in the world’ – a reaction that rather undermines his later claim to have kept Philby under surveillance, on Angleton’s orders, during the Beirut years. Copeland had been duped like everyone else, and offered a clear-eyed assessment of the damage inflicted by the KGB’s most effective spy: ‘What Philby provided was feedback about the CIA’s reactions. They [the KGB] could accurately determine whether or not reports fed to the CIA were believed or not . . . what it comes to, is that when you look at the whole period from 1944 to 1951, the entire Western intelligence effort, which was pretty big, was what you might call minus advantage. We’d have been better off doing nothing.’
In March 1963, under intense pressure from the media, the British government was forced to acknowledge that Philby was missing. Three months later, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, issued a statement, declaring: ‘Since Mr Philby resigned from the Foreign Service in 1951, twelve years ago, he has had no access of any kind to any official information.’ That same month, Philby was granted Soviet citizenship. ‘Hello, Mr Philby’ ran the headline in Izvestia, the official Soviet newspaper, accompanied by a sketch of the defector in Pushkin Square. And so began the Great Philby Myth: the super-spy who had bamboozled Britain, divulged her secrets and those of her allies for thirty years, and then escaped to Moscow in a final triumphant coup de théâtre, leaving the wrong-footed dupes of MI6 wringing their hands in dismay. That myth, occasionally spruced up by Russian propaganda and eagerly propagated by Philby himself, has held firm ever since.
But there were some to whom the story of Philby’s daring night-time getaway did not quite ring true. ‘Philby was allowed to escape,’ wrote Desmond Bristow. ‘Perhaps he was even encouraged. To have brought him back to England and convicted as a traitor would have been even more embarrassing; and when they convicted him, could they really have hanged him?’ That view was echoed in Moscow. Yuri Modin, the canny Soviet case officer, wrote: ‘To my mind the whole business was politically engineered. The British government had nothing to gain by prosecuting Philby. A major trial, to the inevitable accompaniment of spectacular revelation and scandal, would have shaken the British establishment to its foundations.’ Far from being caught out by Philby’s defection, ‘the secret service had actively encouraged him to slip away’, wrote Modin. Many in the intelligence world believed that by leaving the door open to Moscow and then walking away, Elliott had deliberately forced Philby into exile. And they may have been right.
Divining Elliott’s precise motives is impossible, because for the next thirty years he carefully obscured and muddied them. To some, he played the role of the sucker, describing Philby’s flight as a shock, and claiming that the possibility of defection had never occurred to him. But to others, he gave the opposite impression: that he was entirely unsurprised by Philby’s flight, because he had engineered it. In a book written years later under KGB supervision, Philby depicted his defection as the heroic checkmate move of the grandmaster: ‘I knew exactly how to handle it,’ he wrote. ‘How could they have stopped me?’ The answer: very easily. Simply posting a Watcher on Rue Kantari would have made it all but impossible for Philby to flee. But no such effort was made. As Modin wrote, ‘spiriting Philby out of Lebanon was child’s play’, because Elliott and MI6 had made it so easy – suspiciously easy, in Modin’s mind.
There are two, diametrically opposed interpretations of Philby’s flight to Moscow: according to the first, Philby was the virtuoso spy, and Elliott the fool; according to the second, those roles were reversed. Under the first scenario, Philby took the decision, waited until British intelligence was looking the other way, and ran. The ease of his defection, he wrote, was the result of British blundering, ‘a mistake, simple stupidity’. This version of events requires the assumption that MI6 was not merely inefficient and naive, but quite astonishingly dim. A second, more plausible story goes like this: Elliott successfully extracted the confession that ensured Philby was now under MI6 control; he made it crystal clear that Philby’s continued liberty was dependent on his continued cooperation; then, perhaps with the connivance of Dick White, he stepped away, spread the rumour that Lunn had gone skiing, and allowed Philby to believe the coast was clear, the road to Moscow wide open.
Among those who thought that Elliott, and not Philby, had won the last round, was Kim Philby himself. He left Beirut thinking he had jumped; only later did Philby come to believe that he had been pushed.
*
Kim Philby was welcomed to Moscow by the KGB, given a thorough medical examination, and installed in a flat, luxurious by Soviet standards. A minder was appointed to guard him. He was given a salary of about £200 a month, and a promise that his children would be financially supported back in Britain. The KGB agreed to bring furniture and furnishings from Beirut, including an oak table given to him by Tommy Harris. Two of his favourite pipes were purchased in Jermyn Street, and shipped to Moscow in the diplomatic bag. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were both living in Moscow, although they had by now fallen out, partly as a result of an incident during which a drunken Burgess had urinated in the fireplace of the Chinese embassy. The spy’s circumstances had changed, but his habits not at all. In the summer of 1963, he died of liver failure, leaving Philby his 4,000-book library. Philby did not see him before he died, though he later claimed that he had been prevented from doing so by his Russian handlers. ‘Burgess was a bit of an embarrassment here,’ he told the journalist Phillip Knightley. Philby had books, his pipes, furniture and rugs; now he wanted his wife.
In May, four months after Philby’s disappearance, Eleanor Philby flew to London. The press was now rampaging all over the story of the defection of the Third Man, and lying in wait for her. A few weeks earlier an ‘unmistakably Russian’ man had appeared at her door, and declared, ‘I’m from Kim. He wants you to join him. I’m here to help.’ She refused the offer, reported it to Elliott, and arrived in Britain in a state of utter confusion, still uncertain where her husband was, and not knowing whether to believe the stories about his espionage and defection.
Nicholas Elliott sent a car to pick her up from the airport to escape the press. He found her a doctor to treat a swollen ankle, and then, once she was back on her feet, took her out to lunch. When Eleanor brought up the subject of reuniting with Philby, Elliott was insistent: ‘Kim was an active communist agent and [she] should on no account contemplate going to Moscow.’ He warned her: ‘They probably won’t let you out, if you go.’ Eleanor was struck, once again, by Elliott’s ‘surprising tenderness’, but was still reluctant to accept that her husband was a Soviet spy. Elliott offered to summon the head of MI6 himself, in order to persuade her. Dick White appeared within the hour, and Elliott installed them together in the sitting room of Wilton Street with coffee and a bottle of brandy. White was courteous, adamant, and only slightly untruthful. ‘We have definitely known for the last seven years that Kim has been working for the Russians without pay,’ he said. White had suspected Philby for far longer than that, but had discovered clear-cut proof of his guilt less than a year earlier. By the end of the afternoon, Eleanor Philby was in floods of tears, woozy on sedatives and brandy, but finally convinced that her husband was indeed a spy. She had been, in her words, ‘the victim of a prolonged and monstrous confidence trick’, yet she was still determined to join the conman in Moscow.
In September she received another letter from Kim: ‘All I am thinking of now is seeing you.’ Elliott did everything he could to dissuade her from going. One day he bought her a ticket to see Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, in which a community is attacked by avian marauders. ‘I don’t know what he had in mind, except perhaps to demoralise me,’ she later wrote. This was, perhaps, Elliott’s way of warning Eleanor that a life that seems calm and secure can swiftly turn to nightmare. She was unmoved, and a few days later found herself in the office of the smiling Soviet consul, who told her to be read
y to fly to Moscow in two days, before handing over £500 in cash: ‘Buy yourself some very warm clothes.’
When Eleanor announced she was leaving, Elliott mobilised his own wife in a last-ditch attempt to get her to see sense.
‘What would you do if the man you loved went behind the Iron Curtain?’ Eleanor asked Elizabeth, as they drank tea.
The idea of Nicholas Elliott defecting to the USSR was so preposterous that Elizabeth found it hard not to laugh. But as Eleanor wrote later, ‘she finally admitted that she would do the same thing I was planning to do’.
Elliott feared that Eleanor might be trapped for ever in Russia, and believed that any attempt to resume her marriage to Philby was doomed. Yet he could not help admiring her bravery, and the ‘passionate loyalty and devotion’ that the betrayer could still inspire. ‘Although I had put the fear of God into her she was determined to return to Moscow and have it out with him. She left the next day.’
Eleanor flew to Moscow on 26 September 1963, and landed at the airport disguised in a turban and dark glasses. Philby and his minder were waiting. ‘Eleanor, is that you?’ he said.
*
Late one night, a few weeks later, Elliott heard a soft thump as a letter, delivered by hand, dropped into the letter box at 13 Wilton Street. Inside was a typewritten letter, and an empty envelope addressed to Kim Philby at PO Box 509, Central Post Office, Moscow. The letter carried no postmark, date or letterhead, but the handwriting was unmistakable.
Dear Nick,
I wonder if this letter will surprise you. Our last transactions were so strange that I cannot help thinking that perhaps you wanted me to do a fade.
I am more than thankful for your friendly interventions at all times. I would have got in touch with you earlier, but I thought it better to let time do its work on the case.
It is invariably with pleasure that I remember our meetings and talks. They did much to help one get one’s bearings in this complicated world! I deeply appreciate, now as ever, our old friendship, and I hope that rumours which have reached me about your having had some trouble on my account, are exaggerated.
It would be bitter to feel that I might have been a source of trouble to you, but I am buoyed up by my confidence that you will have found a way out of any difficulties that may have beset you.
I have often thought that there are a number of questions connected with the whole story that might interest you, and it might be helpful all round if we could get together as in old times and discuss matters of mutual interest. After careful thought, I have come to the conclusion that Helsinki, which you could reach without difficulty, would be a suitable rendezvous – or perhaps Berlin?
I am enclosing an unsealed, addressed envelope. In the event of your agreeing to my proposal, would you post it, enclosing some view of Tower Bridge? On receipt of your letter, I will write again, through the same channel, and make suggestions about the admin. side of the rendezvous.
As you have probably guessed, I am sending this letter by ‘safe hand’ to your private address for obvious reasons. You will, of course, treat this as a wholly private communication concerning only our two selves. At least, I hope you will see your way to follow my advice in this matter.
Guy’s death was a bitter blow. He had been very ill for a long time, and only his ox-like constitution enabled him to live as long as he did. What a pity we shall never be able to gather à trois at Pruniers!
Let me hear from you soon.
Love to Elizabeth (to whom by the way, you had better not disclose the contents of this letter – nor to anyone else of course).
Elliott was astonished. Philby wrote as if his betrayal had been no more than a hiccup in their long friendship. It was as if Vermehren, Volkov, the pixies and the countless others betrayed to their deaths had never existed. Was he trying to lure Elliott into a trap? Or was this an attempt to persuade him to turn double agent, to change his bearings in this ‘complicated world’? The sending of a blank postcard of Tower Bridge would convey a message that the KGB could interpret: was this intended to show that Philby was acting without KGB approval, and therefore a hint that he was prepared to be reeled back in, to ‘discuss matters of mutual interest’? Elliott’s initial reaction was one of outrage. ‘It was ridiculous to suppose that I would agree to meet him behind the backs of my boss and my wife.’ The old Philby charm, laced with bravado, was there in abundance, with its allusion to their valued friendship, and the hope that he had not damaged his friend’s career. Elliott decided that the letter must be ‘an incredibly clumsy piece of KGB disinformation, obviously designed to throw doubts on my loyalty’. The next morning he took the letter in to MI6 headquarters, and showed it to Dick White, who was equally intrigued. The strange missive prompted ‘many hours of discussion as to what, if anything, should be done about it’. Elliott was in favour of setting up a meeting, ‘because first, I was certainly fitter than he was, and secondly because I could choose the rendezvous’. He was overruled.
The key to Philby’s intentions may lie in the first line of the letter. He wanted to know, once and for all, whether Elliott had deliberately cornered him into defecting. Trading once more on their friendship, he hoped to find out if, in the end, he had really won the battle of manipulation, whether he had outmanoeuvred Elliott, or the other way round.
Elliott did not give him that satisfaction, but he did send back a last, unmistakably barbed message, a blunt reference to just one ‘tragic episode’ among so many, and just one of the many people Philby had destroyed, an epitaph for a friendship brutally betrayed: ‘Put some flowers for me on poor Volkov’s grave.’
See Notes on Chapter 19
20
Three Old Spies
Kim Philby did not love Moscow, and Moscow did not love him, though both tried to pretend otherwise. Philby may have believed, back in 1934, that he was joining an ‘elite’ force, but found he had no KGB rank, and little to do. In Russian eyes, he was an agent, not an officer, and one of little further use. He was welcomed, thanked, debriefed and rewarded; but he was never quite trusted. The ease with which he had escaped from Beirut may have rekindled doubts long dormant in Moscow, the uneasy, queasy suspicion that he might yet be double-crossing the KGB. Yuri Modin found him unreadable: ‘He never revealed his true self. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves ever managed to pierce the armour of mystery that clad him . . . in the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.’ A KGB minder accompanied him everywhere, ostensibly as protection against possible British retaliation, but also as guard, and jailer. He remained, in the words of one KGB officer, an ‘Englishman to his fingertips’, and therefore innately suspect. In Britain, Philby had been too British to be doubted; in Russia, he was too British to be believed.
When Philby’s copies of The Times arrived in Moscow, usually weeks after publication, he carefully ironed them, and then pored over accounts of cricket matches long since over. He ate thick-cut Oxford marmalade on his toast, sipped imported English tea, and listened to the BBC World Service every evening at seven. When his children visited from the West, they brought Marmite, Worcestershire sauce, and spices for the Indian meals he liked to cook. He wore a tweed jacket in hound’s-tooth check, and a woollen tie. He drank Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky, often obliteratingly. He described Russia as his ‘homeland’, insisting that he had never really ‘belonged’ to the British ruling class, and could not, therefore, have betrayed it. But more honestly, he admitted that he was ‘wholly and irreversibly English’. At times he sounded like a retired civil servant put out to grass (which, in a way, he was) harrumphing at the vulgarity of modern life, protesting against change. The new ways of cricket baffled and enraged him. ‘Aluminium bats, white balls, funny clothes . . . it is all too confusing for a gentleman of the old school like myself.’ In an unconscious echo of Marcus Lipton MP, he grumbled about ‘the ghastly din of modern music’ and ‘hooligans inflamed by bourgeois rock music’.
Philby rekindled his friendship with Donald Maclean and his wife Melinda, and the two exiled couples were naturally thrown together. Maclean spoke fluent Russian, and had been given a job analysing British foreign policy. He often worked late. Philby and Melinda started going to the opera, and then on shopping trips together. In 1964, Eleanor returned to the US to renew her passport and see her daughter. In her absence, Kim Philby and Melinda Maclean started an affair. It was a fitting liaison: Philby was secretly sleeping with the wife of an ideological comrade, and cheating on his own wife, repeating once again the strange cycle of friendship and betrayal that defined his world. Eleanor returned, discovered the affair, and announced she was leaving him for good: Philby did not try to stop her. He did, however, present her with his most treasured possession, his old Westminster scarf. ‘It had travelled with him – from school days to exile in Moscow,’ wrote Elliott. This symbolic loyalty to his old school was, Elliott thought, a ‘supreme example of schizophrenia’. At the airport, a KGB officer sent Eleanor on her way with a bunch of tulips.