A Spy Among Friends (31 page)

Philby accepted the double job offer without hesitation. Here was an arrangement that suited everyone: the
Observer
and
Economist
got an experienced reporter with good local contacts; MI6 got a veteran agent in a volatile part of the world, whose cover as a journalist would enable him to travel freely; Elliott got his friend back in the saddle; and Philby got paid, and an opportunity to start a new life in sunny Beirut.

Dick White, the new head of MI6, had led the hunt for the Third Man, but he did not try to prevent the re-hiring of Philby. Indeed, at this stage he may have been unaware of it. After Macmillan’s statement, the case against Philby had gone cold and, according to White’s biographer, there was ‘no appetite for reopening old wounds’. Though still convinced of Philby’s guilt, and ‘irritated that Elliott should number himself among Philby’s staunchest supporters’, White is said to have shown ‘no emotion’ when the subject of Philby was raised. But it is also possible that Elliott chose not to explain that Philby was back on the payroll. Senior MI6 officers enjoyed considerable latitude, and in the more remote stations they carried on their business with little supervision. Officers in Beirut believed that the new C was ‘unaware’ of their activities, and would have been ‘horrified if he knew’. Some historians have speculated that White sent Philby to Beirut as part of a clever trap to lure him into making contact with Soviet intelligence. More likely, White did not know (and perhaps did not want to know) the full story, and Elliott did not want to tell him. The responsibility for bringing Philby in from the cold was down to one man. As Phillip Knightley writes: ‘It was Nicholas Elliott, his old friend, his most ardent defender in SIS who was giving him this chance to work his way back into the club.’

Once again, Elliott and Philby’s lives seemed to move in parallel: while Philby headed to the Middle East, Elliott took up a new job as MI6 station chief in Vienna. Usually so ebullient, Elliott could summon little enthusiasm for his new posting. Vienna, he wrote, ‘had an ersatz gaiety and smelled of corruption’. The city seemed dowdy and drab, with few opportunities for high-grade espionage. His former school friend Peter Lunn preceded him in the post, and bequeathed him a comfortable apartment overlooking the Belvedere Palace gardens, with room for his growing family. Lunn also left him a bad-tempered Slovene cook called Irene and a red Wolseley (a conspicuous vehicle for a spy since it was the only one of its kind in the city). He went skiing at weekends, enjoyed poking fun at his stodgy Viennese counterparts and set about establishing a network of spies. But he was bored in Austria. ‘The climate of Vienna is not conducive to energy,’ he wrote.

The Beirut job finally put paid to the Philbys’ marriage. ‘Haunted by Kim’s life of treason’ and agonised by the stress of his public acquittal, the discovery that her husband was leaving the country sent Aileen into terminal alcoholic decline. There was never any question that she and the children would accompany him to Beirut; she did not try to stop him, and if she had, it would have made no difference. Her psychiatrist became so alarmed by her disintegration that he had her briefly committed to a mental hospital. With the children at boarding school, Aileen shut herself up in the gloomy house in Crowborough which, according to Flora Solomon, ‘she maintained in the hope of a reconciliation with her errant Kim’. Philby told Aileen he would refund her household bills, and left.

_*

Beirut was exotic, tense and dangerous, a salmagundi of races, religions and politics, rendered even more febrile by the rising tide of Arab nationalism and Cold War conflict. It was fertile ground for journalism in 1956, and an even better place for espionage. ‘Lebanon was the only Arab country without censorship and with good communications,’ wrote the newspaper correspondent Richard Beeston, who arrived in the city shortly before Philby. ‘So inevitably Beirut became the listening post for the region, with the St Georges [Hotel] and its bar its epicentre – a bazaar for the trading of information between diplomats, politicians, journalists and spies.’ Philby landed at Beirut airport in August, and made straight for the bar of the St Georges.

The Beirut beat was a demanding one. Middle Eastern politics were as complex and volatile in 1956 as they are today. But as Philby knew from his years as a correspondent in Civil War Spain, there is no better cover job for a spy than that of journalist, a profession that enables the asking of direct, unsubtle and impertinent questions about the most sensitive subjects, without arousing suspicion. A topic of interest to readers of the
Observer
could, when explored at greater depth, be passed on to British intelligence. Philby began cultivating people – politicians, military officers, diplomats and other journalists – who might prove useful as sources for journalism, or espionage, or both. The line between Philby’s two occupations was blurred from the outset. At first he lived in a house rented by his father outside Beirut, where the elder Philby had been exiled after criticising Ibn Saud’s successor. When St John Philby returned to Saudi Arabia, Philby took a flat in the Muslim quarter of the city. Richard Beeston met Philby soon after his arrival in the Lebanese capital: ‘He was quintessentially English, relaxed and courteous, amusing – and this, combined with a rather painful stammer, made him pretty well irresistible to women. He could charm the birds out of the trees.’ But beneath the bonhomie, Beeston sensed Philby’s inner solitude. ‘He seemed a rather lonely, rumpled figure.’ He was not alone for long.

Eleanor Brewer was a forty-two-year-old sometime architect, amateur sculptor and former Red Cross worker from Seattle, married to Sam Pope Brewer, the
New York Times
correspondent in Beirut. She was tall and slim, sweet-natured, and restless. She had met her husband in wartime Istanbul, where he was reporting for the
New York Times
and she was working in the overseas branch of the Office of War Information. Nicholas Elliott had known them both in those years, as another glamorous couple in the Istanbul throng. By 1956 Eleanor was unhappily married and bored. Beeston recalled her as a ‘rangy, steady-drinking American, who looked tough and sophisticated. Underneath she was a romantic, and politically naïve.’ Like most people who proclaim themselves free spirits, she was fiercely conventional.

Sam Brewer had first encountered Philby while covering the Spanish Civil War, so when the American newspaperman learned that his former colleague had arrived in Beirut, he was eager to extend a welcome. In early September, Brewer left Beirut on an extended reporting trip, and told his wife to keep an eye out for Philby: ‘If I should meet Kim I was to introduce him to our friends, and do what I could to help him,’ she later recalled. Eleanor’s welcome to Philby would prove rather warmer than her husband had intended.

On 12 September 1956, Eleanor Brewer was drinking with some friends at the St Georges, when someone pointed out Kim Philby, sitting at the bar. She sent a message via the waiter, inviting him to join their party.

What touched me first about Kim Philby was his loneliness. A certain old-fashioned reserve set him apart from the easy familiarity of the other journalists. He was then forty-four, of medium height, very lean with a handsome heavily lined face. His eyes were an intense blue . . . He had a gift of such intimacy that I found myself talking freely to him. I was very impressed by his beautiful manners. We took him under our wing. He soon became one of our closest friends.

Philby spent Christmas with the Brewers. Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife. The secret lovers met at a little café they called the Shaky Floor, although the shakiness of the floor may have been due to the amount they drank there. They shared picnics in the hills, smoked hubble-bubble pipes in the Arab coffee houses, and exchanged love notes written in gushing teenage prose. ‘Kim was a delightful companion,’ Eleanor wrote. ‘I had never met a kinder, more interesting person in my entire life.’ Eleanor was besotted, and blamed her husband for their deteriorating marriage. Sam was only interested in politics, she complained, and criticised her cooking: ‘My soufflés were never quite right.’ As in his other life, Philby revelled in the subterfuge, the secret messages and surreptitious meetings, the thrill of deception. While conducting his clandestine love affair, Philby discreetly checked for any signs of surveillance. No one was following him.

Philby’s journalism from Beirut was solid, if unspectacular. When asked to write on a subject he considered too fluffy – such as Arabian slave girls – he used the pseudonym ‘Charles Garner’. Even in journalism, he embraced a double existence. He also began to collect information for his MI6 handlers. He possessed a ‘sound knowledge of their requirements’. Much of his early intelligence work in Lebanon involved chatting informally to senior Arab politicians, and then ‘telling the British government what they really thought’. MI6 was evidently satisfied: a year after Philby’s arrival in Beirut, the visiting head of MI6’s Middle East desk took him to lunch at an expensive restaurant overlooking the sea, and told him his status was being confirmed and his retainer increased. ‘Anxious to be in their good books,’ Philby resolved to work ‘as conscientiously as possible’ for MI6, while awaiting the inevitable call from the KGB.

Philby’s Beirut habits were regular. At midday he would repair to the Normandie Hotel, less conspicuous and cheaper than the St Georges, to down his first drink of the day, vodka with V8, open his post, and read the newspapers. One afternoon, a chunky young man in his thirties, evidently a foreigner, approached Philby at his corner table, and presented him with his card: ‘Petukhov, Soviet Trade Mission’.

‘I read your articles in the
Observer
and in
The
Economist
, Mr Philby,’ he said. ‘I find them very deep. I sought you out to ask you for the favour of your time for a conversation. I am particularly interested in the prospects for a Common Market of the Arab countries.’

Philby could have put an end to his double life at that moment. He could have explained to Petukhov that he had no interest in discussing Arab economics with him, and so conveyed a message to the KGB that he was no longer in the game. Other agents recruited in the 1930s, including Anthony Blunt, had successfully disengaged from Soviet intelligence. He had a new life, a new lover, and two interesting, compatible and remunerative jobs: with the protection of Nicholas Elliott, he was safe from further investigation by MI5; his reputation as a journalist and Middle East expert was growing. He could have rejected the approach from the KGB with impunity. Instead, he invited Petukhov to tea at his flat.

Philby would later frame his decision as one of ideological purity, consistent with the ‘total commitment to the Soviet Union’ he had made at the age of twenty-one. He did what he did, in his own estimation, out of pure political conviction, the guiding principle of his life. He looked with disdain on others who had seen the horrors of Stalinism and abandoned ship. ‘I stayed the course,’ he wrote, ‘in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberration of individuals.’ Philby later claimed that he had experienced moments of doubt, and that his views had been ‘influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime’. But there is no evidence that he ever questioned the ideology he had discovered at Cambridge, changed his opinions, or seriously acknowledged the iniquities of practical communism. Philby never shared or discussed his views, either with friend or foe. Instead, he retained and sustained his faith without the need for priests or fellow believers, in perfect isolation. Philby regarded himself as an ideologue and a loyalist; in truth, he was a dogmatist, valuing only one opinion: his own.

But there was more than politics in Philby’s eager return to the embrace of the KGB. Philby
enjoyed
deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce. Some men like to parade their knowledge. Others revel in the possession of information that they decline to share, and the private sense of superiority that this brings. Philby was a faithless husband, but a kind lover, a good friend, a gentle father and a generous host. He had a talent for tenderness. But he also relished withholding the truth from those he was closest to; there was the Philby they knew, and then there was the Philby only he knew. The alcohol helped maintain the double life. For an alcoholic has already become divorced from his or her real self, hooked on an artificial reality. Philby did not want to give up spying, and he probably could not have stopped if he had wanted to: because he was addicted.

The day after their encounter at the Normandie, Petukhov arrived promptly at Philby’s flat at three in the afternoon – it was a dangerous place for a rendezvous, and one that would not be repeated. The ground rules were established. If Philby wanted a meeting, he would stand on his balcony holding a newspaper at a given hour; if he needed to see Petukhov urgently, he would be holding a book. Henceforth, Philby and his new case officer would meet at regular intervals, always after sunset, always in Beirut, always in some discreet corner of the city. The KGB residence in Beirut was ‘a hive of activity’, according to Yuri Modin, with agents deployed throughout the Middle East. Philby was told that his first priority was to ascertain ‘the intentions of the United States and British governments in the area’. He happily set to work.