A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

I resigned from the Service at the age of thirty-three, having made a negligible contribution. Elliott resigned at the age of fifty-three, having been central to pretty well every major operation that the Service had undertaken since the outbreak of the Second World War. Years later, I bumped into him at a party.

  After a turbulent spell in the City, Elliott in the most civilised of ways seemed a bit lost. He was also deeply frustrated by our former Service’s refusal to let him reveal secrets which in his opinion had long passed their keep-till date. He believed he had a right, even a duty, to speak truth to history. And perhaps that’s where he thought I might come in – as some sort of go-between or cut out, as the spies would have it, who would help him get his story into the open where it belonged.

  Above all, he wanted to talk to me about his friend, colleague, and nemesis, Kim Philby.

  And so it happened, one evening in May 1986 in my house in Hampstead, twenty-three years after he had sat down with Philby in Beirut and listened to his partial confession, that Nicholas Elliott opened his heart to me in what turned out to be the first in a succession of such meetings. Or if not his heart, a version of it.

  And it quickly became clear that he wanted to draw me in, to make me marvel, as he himself marvelled; to make me share his awe and frustration at the enormity of what had been done to him; and to feel, if I could, or at least imagine, the outrage and the pain that his refined breeding and good manners – let alone the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act – obliged him to conceal.

  Sometimes while he talked I scribbled in a notebook and he made no objection. Looking over my notes a quarter of a century later – twenty-eight pages from one sitting alone, handwritten on fading notepaper, a rusty staple at one corner – I am comforted that there is hardly a crossing out.

  Was I contemplating a novel built around the Philby-Elliott relationship? I can’t have been. I’d already covered the ground in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A piece of live theatre, perhaps? A two-hander, the Nick & Kim Show, spread over twenty years of mutual affection – I dare almost call it love – and devastating, relentless betrayal?

  If that was what I secretly had in mind, Elliott would have none of it:

  ‘May we not ever again think about the play,’ he wrote to me sternly in 1991. And I have tried not to ever since.

  Like Philby, Elliott never spoke a word out of turn, however much he drank: except of course to Philby himself. Like Philby, he was a five-star entertainer, always a step ahead of you, bold, raunchy, and funny as hell. Yet I don’t believe I ever seriously doubted that what I was hearing from Elliott was the cover story – the self-justification – of an old and outraged spy.

  But where Philby’s cover story was crafted to deceive his enemies, the purpose of Elliott’s was to deceive himself. And as Ben Macintyre points out, over time the cover story began to appear in different and conflicting versions, of which I was treated to one.

  In his monologues to me – for such they often were – he made much of his efforts, under Dick White’s guidance, to winkle the ‘truth’ out of Philby in the ten years leading up to the confrontation in Beirut: not the whole truth, God forbid! That would have been something that in their worst nightmares both White and Elliott had refused to contemplate.

  But the limited truth, the digestible version: namely, in Elliott’s jargon, that somewhere back in the war years when it was understandable, Kim had gone a bit squidgy about our gallant Russian ally and given him a bit of this and that; and if he could just get it off his chest, whatever it was he’d given them, we’d all feel a lot better, and he could get on with doing what he did best, which was beating the Russian at his own game.

  Alas, Macintyre’s researches prove incontrovertibly that no such cat-and-mouse game took place: rather that, as the clouds of suspicion gathered, the two friends went, not face to face, but shoulder to shoulder. Long drunken evenings spent together? Any number of them. Alcohol was so much a part of the culture of MI6 in those days that a non-drinker in the ranks could look like a subversive or worse.

  But as to Elliott’s claim that he was all the while probing for chinks in Philby’s armour: well, Elliott may have believed it – and certainly he was determined that I should believe it too – because, in the world that he and Philby had inhabited together for so long, the man whose cover story is not believed is the man who is operationally dead.

  *

  ‘Terrific charmer, with an impulse to shock. I knew Philby terribly well, specially the family. I really cared for them. I never knew a fellow like him for getting pissed. I’d interrogate him, he’d drink Scotch the whole time, I’d literally have to load him into a cab to send him home. Give the driver five quid to cart him upstairs. Took him to a dinner party once. Charmed everyone, then suddenly he started talking about his hostess’s tits. Said she had the best breasts in the Service. Totally off-colour. I mean you don’t, at a dinner party, start talking about your hostess’s tits. But that’s how he was. Liked to shock. I knew the father too. I had him to dinner in Beirut the night he died. Fascinating chap. Talked endlessly about his relationship with Ibn Saud. Eleanor, Philby’s third wife, adored him. The old boy managed to make a pass at someone’s wife, then left. A few hours later he’d died. Last words were ‘God I’m bored.’

  In the absence of his wife Elizabeth, I had already noted that Elliott consistently referred to Philby by his surname. Only in her presence did Philby become Kim.’

  *

  ‘My interrogation of Philby lasted a long time. The one in Beirut was the end of a series. We had two sources. One was a pretty good defector. The other was this mother figure. The Office shrink had told me about her. He rang me up, the shrink. He’d been treating Aileen, Philby’s second wife, and he said, “She’s released me from my Hippocratic Oath. I’ve got to talk to you.” So I went and saw him and he told me Philby was homosexual. Never mind all his philandering, never mind that Aileen, whom I knew pretty well, said Philby liked his sex and was pretty good at it. He was homosexual, all part of a syndrome, and the psychiatrist, on no evidence he knew of, was also convinced he was bad. Working for the Russians. Or something. He couldn’t be precise but he was sure of it. He advised me to look for a mother figure. Somewhere there’ll be a mother figure, he said. It was this woman Solomon. [Flora Solomon who introduced Philby to Aileen in 1939.] Jewish woman. She was working in Marks and Spencer’s, a buyer or something. She was angry with Philby over the Jewish thing. Philby had been working for Colonel Teague, who was Head of Station in Jerusalem, and Teague was anti-Jewish, and she was angry. So she told us some things about him. Five (MI5) were in charge by then, and I passed it all on to Five – get the mother figure, Solomon. Wouldn’t listen of course, they’re too bureaucratic.’

  *

  ‘People were so naughty about Philby. Sinclair and Menzies [former Chiefs of MI6] – well, they just wouldn’t listen to anything against him.’

  *

  ‘So this cable came, saying they had the proof, and I cabled back to White saying I must go and confront him. It had been an on-going thing for so long, and I owed it to the family to get it out of him. Feel? Well, I don’t think I’m an emotional sort of chap, much, but I was fond of his women and children, and I always had the feeling that Philby himself would like to get the whole thing off his chest and settle down and follow cricket, which was what he loved. He knew cricket averages backwards and forwards. He could recite cricket till the cows came home. So Dick White said okay. Go. So I flew to Beirut and I saw him and I said to him, if you’re as intelligent as I think you are, and for the sake of your family, you’ll come clean, because the game is up. Anyway we could never have nailed him in court, he’d have denied it. Between you and me the deal was perfectly simple. He had to make a clean breast of it, which I thought he wanted to do anyway, which was where he fooled me, and he had to give us everything, but everything on damage. That was paramount. The damage limitation. After all, I mean one of the things the KGB would have been askin
g him was, who can we approach independently of you, who’s in the Service, who might work for us? He might have suggested people. We had to know all that. Then whatever else he’d given them. We were completely firm on that.’

  My notes resort to straight dialogue:

  Self: ‘So what were your sanctions if he didn’t cooperate?’

  Elliott: ‘What’s that, old boy?’

  ‘Your sanctions, Nick, what you could threaten him with in the extreme case. Could you have him sandbagged, for instance, and flown to London?’

  ‘Nobody wanted him in London, old boy.’

  ‘Well, what about the ultimate sanction then – forgive me – could you have him killed, liquidated?’

  ‘My dear chap. One of us.’

  ‘So what could you do?’

  ‘I told him, the alternative was a total cut-off. There wouldn’t be an embassy, a consulate, a legation, in the whole of the Middle East that would have the first bloody thing to do with him. The business community wouldn’t touch him, his journalistic career would be dead in the water. He’d have been a leper. His whole life would have been over. It never even crossed my mind he’d go to Moscow. He’d done this one thing in the past, he wanted it out of the way, so he’d got to come clean. After that we’d forget it. What about his family and Eleanor?’

  I mention the fate of less favoured traitors who did far less than Philby but spent years in prison for it:

  ‘Ah well, Vassall – well he wasn’t top league, was he?’ [John William Vassall, homosexual son of an Anglican parson and clerk to the naval attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow, was sentenced to eighteen years for spying for the KGB.]

  *

  ‘That was the first session and we agreed to meet again at four o’clock and at four o’clock he turned up with a confession, sheets of it, eight or nine closely typed pages of stuff, on the damage, on everything, masses of it. Then he says, you could do me a favour actually. Eleanor knows you’re in town. She doesn’t know anything about me. But if you don’t come round for a drink she’ll smell a rat. So I say all right, for Eleanor’s sake I’ll come round and have a drink with you. But first of all I’ve got to encode this stuff and cable it to Dick White, which I did. When I got to his place for a drink, he’d passed out. Pissed. Lying on the floor. Eleanor and I had to put him to bed. She took his head, I took his feet. He never said anything when he was pissed. Never spoke a loose word in his life, far as I know. So I told her. I said to her, “You know what this is about, don’t you?” She said, “No,” so I said, “He’s a bloody Russian spy.” He’d told me she hadn’t rumbled him, and he was right. So I went home to London and left him to Peter Lunn to carry on the interrogation. Dick White had handled the case jolly well, but he hadn’t said a word to the Americans. So I had to dash over to Washington and tell them. Poor old Jim Angleton. He’d made such a fuss of Philby when he was head of the Service’s station in Washington, and when Angleton found out – when I told him, that is – he sort of went all the other way. I had dinner with him just a few days ago.’

  *

  ‘My theory is, you see, that one day the KGB will publish the rest of Philby’s autobiography. The first book sort of cut itself dead at 1947. My guess is, they’ve got another book in their locker. One of the things Philby has told them is to polish up their goons. Make ’em dress properly, smell less. Sophisticated. They’re a totally different-looking crowd these days. Smart as hell, smooth, first-class chaps. Philby’s work, that was, you bet your boots. No, we never thought of killing him. He fooled me though. I thought he wanted to stay where he was.’

  *

  ‘You know, looking back though – don’t you agree? – at all the things we got up to – all right we had some belly-laughs – my God we had some belly-laughs – we were terribly amateurish, in a way. I mean those lines through the Caucasus, agents going in and out, it was so amateurish. Well, he betrayed Volkov, of course, and they killed him. So when Philby wrote to me from Moscow and invited me to go and meet him in Berlin or Helsinki, and not tell Elizabeth or Dick White, I wrote back and told him to put some flowers on Volkov’s grave for me. I thought that was rather good.

  ‘I mean, who the hell did he think I was, not telling them? The first person I’d tell was Elizabeth, and immediately after that, I’d tell Dick White. I’d been out to dinner with Gehlen [Reinhard Gehlen, at that time director of the BND, West Germany’s secret service] – did you know Gehlen? – came back late at night, and there was this plain envelope on the doormat with “Nick” written on it. Dropped in by hand. “If you can come, send me a postcard with Nelson’s Column on it for Helsinki, Horseguards for Berlin,” some damned thing. Who the hell did he think I was? The Albanian operation? Well yes, he probably blew that too. I mean we had some fucking good assets in Russia too in the old days. Don’t know what happened to them either. Then he wants to meet me because he’s lonely. Well of course he’s lonely. He shouldn’t have gone. He fooled me. I’ve written about him. The Sherwood Press. The big publishers all wanted me to write about the interrogation, but I wouldn’t. It’s more for one’s climbing friends, a memoir. You can’t write about the Office. Interrogation’s an art. You understand that. It went on over a long time. Where was I?’

  *

  Sometimes Elliott drifted off into reminiscences of other cases that he had been involved in. The most significant was that of Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU colonel who provided the West with vital Soviet defence secrets in the run-up to the Cuba missile crisis. Elliott was infuriated by a book concocted by the CIA as a piece of Cold War propaganda and published under the title of The Penkovsky Papers:

  ‘Frightful book. Made out the fellow was some kind of saint or hero. He was nothing of the sort, he’d been passed over and he was pissed off. The Americans turned him down but Shergy [Harold Shergold, controller of MI6’s Soviet bloc operations] knew he was all right. Shergy had the nose. We couldn’t have been less similar but we got on marvellously. Les extrèmes se touchent. I was in charge of Ops, Shergy was my number two. Marvellous field man, very sensitive, almost never wrong. He’d been right about Philby too, from very early. Shergold looked Penkovsky over and thought yes, so we took him on. Very brave thing, in spying, to put your faith in someone. Any fool can go back to his desk and say “I don’t altogether trust this chap. On the one hand, on the other hand.” It takes a lot of guts to take a flyer and say “I believe in him.” That’s what Shergy did, and we went along with him. Women. Penkovsky had these whores in Paris, we laid them on, and he complained he couldn’t do anything with them: once a night and that was it. We had to send the Office doctor out to Paris to give him a shot in the bum so that he could get it up. You do get some belly-laughs, they were what one lived for sometimes. These marvellous belly-laughs. I mean how could you crack up Penkovsky to be a hero? Mind you, betrayal takes courage. You have to hand it to Philby too. He had courage. Shergy resigned once. He was frightfully temperamental. I came in, found his resignation on my desk. “In view of the fact that Dick White” – he put CSS of course – “has passed information to the Americans without my consent, and has therefore endangered my very sensitive source, I wish to resign as an example to other members of the Service” – something like that. White apologised and Shergy took back his resignation. I had to talk him round though. Wasn’t easy. Very temperamental chap. But a marvellous field man. And he got Penkovsky dead right. Artist.’

  *

  Elliott on Sir Claude Dansey, also known as Colonel Z, deputy chief of MI6 during World War II:

  ‘Utter shit. Stupid too. But tough and rude. Wrote these awful short minutes to people. Carried on feuds. I mean a real shit. I took over his networks when I became head of station in Berne after the war. Well he did have these high level business sources. They were good. He had a knack of getting these businessmen to do things for him. He was good at that.’

  On Sir George Young, vice chief to Sir Dick White during the Cold War:

  ‘Flawed. Brilliant, c
oarse, always had to be out on his own. He went to Hambro’s after the Service. I asked them later: how did you make out with George? Were you up or down? They said they reckoned, about even. He got them some of the Shah’s money, but he made perfectly awful balls-ups that cost them about as much as he got for them.’

  On Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, historian and wartime member of SIS:

  ‘Brilliant scholar, all that, but wet and useless. Something perverse inside him. Laughed my head off when he took a dive on those Hitler diaries. The whole Service knew they were fake. But Hugh walked straight in. How could Hitler have written them? I wouldn’t have the chap near me in the war. When I was head man in Cyprus I told my sentry at the door that if a Captain Trevor-Roper showed up, he should shove his bayonet up his arse. He showed up, the sentry told him what I’d said. Hugh was puzzled. Belly-laughs. That’s what I liked about the Service. Marvellous belly-laughs.’

  On providing a prostitute for a potential SIS asset from the Middle East:

  ‘St Ermin’s Hotel. She wouldn’t go. Too near the House of Commons. “My father’s an MP.” She had to have 4 June off so that she could take her nephew out from Eton. “Well perhaps you’d rather we got someone else?” I said. Didn’t hesitate. “All I want to know is, how much?”

  On Graham Greene:

  ‘I met him in Sierra Leone in the war. Greene was waiting for me at the harbour. “Have you brought any French letters?” he yelled at me soon as I came within earshot. He had this fixation about eunuchs. He’d been reading the station code book and found that the Service actually had a code group for eunuch. Must have been from the days when we were running eunuchs in the harems, as agents. He was dying to make a signal with eunuch in it. Then one day he found a way. Head Office wanted him to attend a conference somewhere. Cape Town I think. He had some operation fixed or something. Not an operation, knowing him, he never mounted one. Anyway he signalled back “Like the eunuch I can’t come.”’