A Spy Among Friends (41 page)

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’.

Other old habits persisted. His marriage to Eleanor staggered on for a time, but it was broken inside. She found Moscow grey, cold and lonely. One day she asked him: ‘What is more important in your life, me and the children, or the Communist Party?’ Philby’s answer was the one he always gave when asked to measure feeling against politics. ‘The party, of course.’ He not only demanded admiration for his ideological consistency, for having ‘stayed the course’, but sympathy for what it had cost him. ‘If you only knew what hell it is when your political convictions clash with your personal affections,’ he wrote in a note to the diplomat Glen Balfour-Paul. On the few occasions he received visitors from the West, he asked hungrily after news of friends. ‘Friendship is the most important thing of all,’ he declared, as if he had not undermined every one of his own. Lorraine Copeland wrote that it was ‘painful to think that during the years we all loved Kim and had him constantly in our homes, he was all the while laughing at us’. Philby bridled at that suggestion. ‘I wasn’t laughing at them. 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. The conflict can be very painful. I don’t like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it.’ But not so badly as to stop.

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.

Like Aileen before her, Eleanor did not long survive their final break-up. She wrote a poignant, pained memoir, and died three years after returning to the US. ‘He betrayed many people, me included,’ she wrote. ‘Kim had the guts, or the weakness, to stand by a decision he made thirty years ago, whatever the cost to those who loved him most.’ Eleanor spent the remainder of her life wondering who she had really married, and concluded: ‘No one can ever really know another human being.’

_*

James Jesus Angleton’s personality was transformed by the realisation that he had never really known Kim Philby. His faith in his fellow men had never been strong, but he had believed in the British notion that the inner ring could always be trusted; after Philby’s defection a profound and poisonous paranoia seemed to seize him. ‘The emotional wreckage of that close friendship made him distrust everybody and coloured his life from that point on.’ He became convinced that a vast, overarching conspiracy must be taking place under his nose, orchestrated by Philby, from Moscow. ‘Jim just continued to think that Philby was a key actor in the KGB grand plan,’ one CIA contemporary said of Angleton. ‘To him, Philby was never just a drunken, burned-out ex-spy. He was a leader of the orchestra.’ In Angleton’s warped logic, if Philby had fooled him, then there must be many other KGB spies in positions of influence in the West. ‘Never again would he permit himself to be so badly duped. He would trust no one.’

Convinced that the CIA was riddled with Soviet spies, Angleton set about rooting them out, detecting layer after layer of deception surrounding him. He suspected that a host of world leaders were under KGB control, including British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Olof Palme of Sweden and German Chancellor Willy Brandt. He drew up more than 10,000 case files on suspect individuals, anti-war protesters and internal dissidents, often gathering information by illegal means. The damage he inflicted on the CIA reached such levels that some even accused him of being a Soviet mole himself, destroying the organisation from within by creating a climate of debilitating suspicion. Uncompromising and obsessive, more than a decade after Philby’s vanishing act Angleton was still ascribing every fresh sign of treachery to the man he had once idolised. ‘This is all Kim’s work,’ he would mutter.

Nicholas Elliott watched and wondered as Angleton descended into his wilderness of mirrors. They remained friends, from a distance, but the warmth had gone. The Philby betrayal seemed to metastasise in Angleton’s mind. ‘He had trusted him and confided in him far beyond any routine relationship between the colleagues of two friendly countries,’ wrote Elliott. ‘The knowledge that he, Jim, the top expert in the world on Soviet espionage, had been totally deceived, had a cataclysmic effect on his personality. Jim henceforward found it difficult to trust anybody, to make two and two add up to four.’ Elliott believed his old friend was being devoured by distrust: ‘Over-suspicion can sometimes have more tragic results than over-credulity. His tragedy was that he was so often deceived by his own ingenuity, and the consequences were often disastrous.’

James Angleton was forced out of the CIA in 1974, when the extent of his illegal mole-hunting was revealed. He retired with his orchids, his fishing rods and his secrets, a man of deep and enduring mystery, and a brilliant fool. In retirement, he spent much of his time in the Army and Navy Club, a place strongly redolent of an old-fashioned London gentleman’s club. He continued to insist that he had suspected Kim Philby from the start, but his weeding from CIA files of every reference to his relationship with Philby was proof enough of the falsity of that claim. Philby haunted the CIA. ‘I don’t know that the damage he did can ever be actually calculated,’ wrote Richard Helms, the CIA chief appointed in 1966. One CIA historian assessed the cost by means of italics: ‘at least twenty-five major,
but
major operations, were destroyed.’

In 1987, Angleton attended a luncheon with former CIA officers at the Officers’ Club in Fort Myer outside Washington. He was sixty-nine, but looked a decade older, his body racked by cancer that had started in the lungs. His colleagues urged him to ‘come clean in the Philby case’. Angleton gave one of his crippled half-smiles, and said: ‘There are some matters that I shall have to take to the grave with me, and Kim is one of them.’

A week later, true to his word, he was dead.

_*

Nicholas Elliott’s career was hobbled by his association with Philby. Some in MI6 believed he had allowed Philby to flee Beirut out of personal loyalty. Some still do. By the 1960s, the Robber Barons who had come of age in the 1940s were creatures of the past. MI6 was more professional, less buccaneering, and in Elliott’s view, a lot less fun. Sir Stewart Menzies and Elliott remained close friends. In 1968, the former C fell off his horse while riding with the Beaufort Hunt, and never recovered. Elliott was the only serving MI6 officer to attend the funeral. By now he was Director of Requirements at MI6, responsible for the quality and relevance of information produced by the intelligence service for other government departments. It was an important job, but bureaucratic, and exactly the sort of role he had always despised. ‘To be in administration was, in my view, the last resort.’