A wartime reminiscence of life in Turkey under diplomatic cover:
‘Dinner at the ambassador’s. Middle of the war. Ambassadress lets out a yell because I’ve cut off the nose. “Nose of what?” “The cheese.” “The valet handed me the bloody cheese,” I tell her. “And you cut the nose off it,” she says. Hell did they get it from? Middle of the bloody war. Cheddar. And the chap who’d handed it to me was Cicero, the fellow who sold all our secrets to the Abwehr. The D-Day landing. The lot. And the Huns didn’t believe him. Typical. No faith.’
I am describing to Elliott how, while I was in MI5, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana was published and the Service’s legal adviser wanted to prosecute him under the Official Secrets Act for revealing the relationship between a head of station and his head agent.
‘Yes, and he jolly nearly got done for it. Would have served him bloody right.’
What for? But I didn’t ask.
*
And most memorable of all, perhaps, Elliott recalling a passage, real or imagined, from what he insisted were his early soundings of Philby concerning his Cambridge days:
‘They seem to think you’re a bit tarnished somehow.’
‘By?’
‘Oh, you know, early passions, membership – ’
‘Of?’
‘Jolly interesting group, actually, by the sounds of it. Exactly what university is for. Lefties all getting together. The Apostles, wasn’t it?’
*
In 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall came down, I was visiting Moscow. At a reception given by the Union of Soviet Writers, a part-time journalist with KGB connections named Genrikh Borovik invited me to his house to meet an old friend and admirer of my work. The name of the friend, when I enquired, was Kim Philby. I now have it on pretty good authority that Philby knew he was dying and was hoping I would collaborate with him on another volume of memoirs.
I refused to meet him. Elliott was pleased with me. At least I think he was. But perhaps he secretly hoped I might bring him news of his old friend.
Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby at the age of eighteen: the secret Cambridge communist.
Philby as a boy of about eight years old.
The young Philby: ‘He was the sort of man who won worshippers.’
St John Philby, noted Arab scholar, explorer, writer, troublemaker and demanding father.
Elliott, the Eton schoolboy, born to rule, who hid his shyness behind a barrage of jokes.
Claude Elliott, father of Nicholas, celebrated mountaineer and provost of Eton, accompanies a young Queen Elizabeth II on a tour of the school.
Basil Fisher (left) and Nicholas Elliott: their close friendship came to a tragic end when Fisher was shot down in the Battle of Britain.
The Cambridge spies
Donald Maclean: a talented linguist destined for the Foreign Office.
Guy Burgess: witty, flamboyant, highly intelligent and pure trouble.
Anthony Blunt with Cambridge friends: a brilliant art historian and a Soviet spy.
Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge: the unlikely crucible of communist revolution.
Alice ‘Litzi’ Kohlman, Philby’s first love and first wife, an activist in the Viennese communist underground.
Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian photographer married to an Englishman, arranged Philby’s rendezvous with the Soviet intelligence service.
Street violence erupts in Vienna in 1933, as the extreme right-wing government goes to war with the left.
Nicholas Elliott, as a new recruit to MI6. ‘A convivial camaraderie prevailed, rather like a club.’
James Jesus Angleton, an apprentice intelligence officer in wartime London. An American from Idaho, he was ‘more English than the English’ and an honorary member of the club.
Philby (second from left), The Times war correspondent, at a lunch with Lord Gort (to Philby’s left), commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, 1939.
Arnold Deutsch, alias ‘Otto’, Philby’s charismatic recruiter and spy-master.
Klop Ustinov, Russian-born German journalist, secret agent for Britain and father of the actor Peter Ustinov.
Theodore Maly, Philby’s NKVD controller, later murdered in Stalin’s purges.
Alexander Foote, Britishborn radio operator for the Soviet spy network ‘Rote Kapelle’.
Yuri Modin, the subtle and ingenious handler of the Cambridge spy network.
Igor Gouzenko, masked, awaiting interviews with the press after his defection in 1945.
Dick White, a former schoolmaster, was the chief of MI5 counterintelligence in 1951.
C: Sir Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6.
Felix Cowgill, chief of Section V, the MI6 counter-intelligence unit based in St Albans.
Guy Liddell: MI5 head of counter-intelligence and diarist.
Victor Rothschild, MI5 head of counter-sabotage and friend of Kim Philby.
Valentine Vivian, known as Vee-Vee, the Deputy Chief of MI6 who vouched for Philby: ‘I knew his people.’
Sarah Algeria Marjorie Maxse, organisation officer for the Conservative Party and recruiter for MI6. Philby found her ‘intensely likeable’.
Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley, the Sunday Express war correspondent who steered Philby into MI6.
Elizabeth Holberton, Nicholas Elliott’s MI6 secretary, confidante and finally wife.
The Elliotts on their wedding day, outside the Park Hotel, Istanbul, 10 April 1943.
Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren. The Vermehrens’ defection, organised by Elliott, plunged the German intelligence service into crisis.
Guy Burgess, Philby’s problematic lodger: frequently drunk, faintly malodorous and always supremely entertaining.
Kim Philby (left) was appointed the MI6 station chief in Washington in September 1949. Above, the RMS Caronia, the luxury Cunard liner nicknamed the ‘Green Goddess’ on which he sailed to New York. ‘Philby was a great charmer. He came to us with an enormous reputation,’ said one CIA colleague.
James Angleton, poet, orchidenthusiast, CIA chief of counterintelligence and America’s most powerful mole-hunter.
Bill Harvey of CIA counter-intelligence, the former FBI agent and Philby’s most dangerous opponent in the US.
Harvey’s Oyster Salon, the smart Washington restaurant where Philby and Angleton lunched together: ‘Philby picked him clean.’
Enver Hoxha, Albania’s hardline communist ruler.
David de Crespigny Smiley, an aristocratic British Army officer with a legendary taste for derring-do, seen here with Yemeni resistance fighters.
En route to the Albanian coast for the start of ‘Operation Valuable’, one of the most catastrophic secret operations of the Cold War.
The ‘pixies’ prepare for action: three of the four men in this photograph were killed within hours of landing on the Karaburun peninsula.
The Stormie Seas, a forty-three-ton schooner disguised as a pleasure boat, carrying enough munitions to start a small war.
Two typically irreverent cartoons drawn by Guy Burgess in Moscow: Lenin with a chip on his shoulder and a ferocious Stalin declaring: ‘I’m very human!’
The ‘wanted’ poster issued for Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, after the two men fled from Britain in May 1951.
The Evening Standard headline identifying Philby as the Third Man.
Marcus Lipton MP, defender of parliamentary privilege, enemy of pop music and Philby’s primary accuser.
Philby’s second wife, Aileen, besieged by the press in October 1955 at the family home in Crowborough.
Aileen would die inside this house, after Philby’s departure for Beirut, alcoholic and alone.
She made no comment, despite knowing that Philby was guilty.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, was convinced of Philby’s treachery and enraged that he had not been prosecuted.
James Angleton would later claim that he had long suspected Philby was a spy. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo, the MI5 barrister who subjected Philby to cross-examination and declared: ‘He’s as guilty as hell.’
Jim Skardon, former police detective, head of the surveillance section, and MI5’s chief interrogator. He set out to break Philby.
Dick White became Director General of MI5 in 1953 and chief of MI6 in 1956. He hunted Philby for over a decade.
Richard Brooman-White, MP. With Elliott’s help, the former MI6 officer drew up a brief for Macmillan, stoutly defending Philby.
Harold Macmillan, Foreign Secretary in 1955, told the House of Commons there was ‘no reason’ to suspect Philby of treachery.
Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, head of MI6, accused MI5 of pursuing a vendetta against Philby.
‘The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was some time in 1934.’
Philby invited the world’s press into his mother’s flat to hear him clear his name. ‘Were you in fact the Third Man?’ one journalist asked. Philby answered: ‘No, I was not.’
Philby’s moment of triumph. His Soviet handler, Yuri Modin, described his performance as ‘breathtaking’.
‘On the subject of friendship, I’d prefer to say as little as possible.’
Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, the most famous frogman in Britain, is mobbed by a group of young admirers.
Buster Crabb prepares for a dive.
The Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze and curious crowds in Portsmouth harbour.
Prime Minister Anthony Eden gave instructions that no covert operations should take place during the Russian visit. Operation Claret went ahead anyway.
Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and his premier, Nikolai Bulganin, are welcomed to Britain.
Kim and Eleanor Philby, his third wife, relax at the luxury bathing hut they shared with the Elliotts on Beirut’s Khalde Beach.
Philby relaxes in a mountain pool. These were the ‘happiest years’, wrote Eleanor.
A party at the Copelands’. From left to right: Eleanor Philby, Kim Philby, Miles Copeland, Nicholas Elliott, Lorraine Copeland and Elizabeth Elliott. Three spies serving three intelligence agencies: MI6, the CIA and the KGB.
Nicholas Elliott in casual pose in the family’s Beirut apartment.
Kim Philby, drunk, at a picnic in the hills outside Beirut.
Philby playing with his pet fox, Jackie. The death of this animal left him ‘inconsolable’.
The last photograph of Kim Philby together with his father. In 1960, St John visited his son in Beirut, went to a cocktail party, made a pass at a member of the embassy staff , and died. The loss of his father plunged Kim Philby into a deep alcoholic despair.
Philby’s disappearance from Beirut, and subsequent reappearance in Moscow, prompted a media frenzy.
Flora Solomon, Philby’s old friend, told MI5 that he had attempted to recruit her for ‘dangerous’ work in the communist cause in 1935.
George Blake, the Soviet spy within MI6 who was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to forty-two years in prison.
Soviet intelligence officer Anatoly Golitsyn, whose defection rekindled the Philby investigation.
Out in the cold: Kim Philby in Moscow. The veteran spy insisted Russia was his ‘homeland’ while describing himself as ‘wholly and irreversibly English’, and was never fully trusted by the KGB.
James Jesus Angleton never recovered from Philby’s betrayal, and launched a mole-hunt that inflicted huge damage on the CIA.
Nicholas Elliott in 1992. He never stopped wondering how a man who had seemed so similar to him in every way could have been so utterly different.
Kim Philby: ‘I have always operated on two levels, a personal level and a political one. When the two have come into conflict I have had to put politics first.’
Acknowledgements
I am again indebted to many people who have provided guidance, encouragement and hospitality during the writing of this book, as well as access to documents, photographs and their own memories. I am particularly grateful to the families and descendants of people in a story that remains, for many, a painful chapter of the past. This book would have been impossible to write without the generous help of Mark and David Elliott, son and grandson of Nicholas Elliott, who have proved an endless fund of support and practical assistance. I was also privileged to meet Elizabeth Elliott, widow of Nicholas, just a few weeks before her death in 2012. The list that follows is incomplete, since many of those who were most helpful to me have understandably asked, for professional reasons, to remain anonymous: you know who you are, and how grateful I am.
I would particularly like to thank the following: Nathan Adams, Christopher Andrew, Dick Beeston, the late Rick Beeston, Paul Bellsham, Keith Blackmore, Tom Bower, Roger Boyes, Alex Brooman-White, Caroline Brooman-White, Anthony Cavendish, Rozanne Colchester, Gordon Corera, David Cornwell, Jane Cornwell, Leo Darroch, Natasha Fairweather, Frances Gibb, Oleg Gordievsky, Peter Greenhalgh, Barbara Honigmann, William Hood, Alistair Horne, Keith Jeffery, Margy Kinmonth, Jeremy Lewis, Peter Linehan, Robert McCrum, Philip Marsden, Nick Mays, Tommy Norton, John Julius Norwich, Michael Pakenham, Roland Philipps, Harry Chapman Pincher, Gideon Rachman, Felicity Rubinstein, Jenni Russell, the John Smedley Archives, Xan Smiley, Wolfgang Suschitzky, Anthony Tait, Rupert Walters, Nigel West, Damian Whitworth.
I am indebted to Robert Hands, Peter Martland, Richard Aldrich and Hayden Peake for reading the manuscript and saving me from many embarrassing mistakes: the errors that remain are entirely my own. Once again, Jo Carlill has achieved miracles of picture research; I have enjoyed and profited greatly from working with the BBC: Janice Hadlow, Martin Davidson, Dominic Crossley-Holland, Francis Whateley, Tom McCarthy, Ben Ryder, Louis Caulfield, Adam Scourfield, Dinah Rogers, Gezz Mounter and Jane Chan. My colleagues and friends at The Times have provided help and advice. The generous provision of a fellow commonership by St John’s College Cambridge enabled me to finish the book in the ideal scholarly surroundings.
It is a pleasure and privilege to be published by Bloomsbury: my thanks to Katie Johnson and Anna Simpson for their unfailing proficiency and patience, and to Michael Fishwick, my dear friend and editor. Ed Victor, as ever, has steered another huge and complicated project into port with the skill of a master-mariner.
My family deserves both praise and sympathy for putting up with yet another consuming spy-project without throwing me out; and to Kate, all my love.
Bibliography
Archives
British Library Newspaper Archive, Colindale
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg
Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge
IWM Archives, Imperial War Museum, London
National Archives, Kew
National Archives, Washington DC
The Times Archives
Published Sources
Aldrich, Richard J., GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London, 2011)
Andrew, Christopher, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (London, 2009)
— Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985)
Andrew, Christopher and D. Dilks, eds, The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London, 1984)
Andrew, Christopher and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London, 1990)
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (London, 1999)
— The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (London, 2005)
Balfour Paul, Glencairn, Bagpipes in Babylon: A Lifetime in the Arab World and Beyond (London, 2006)
A Spy Among Friends Page 34