A Spy Among Friends (42 page)

Elliott retired in 1968, after almost thirty years as a spy. ‘Rather to my surprise I did not miss the confidential knowledge which no longer filtered through my in-tray,’ he wrote. He joined the board of Lonrho, the international mining and media company based in Cheapside in the City of London, and led by the maverick businessman Tiny Rowland. Elliott considered Rowland ‘a modern Cecil Rhodes’, which did not stop him from joining a boardroom coup against him. When this failed, Rowland ousted the rebels, including Elliott, whom he described as ‘the Harry Lime of Cheapside’. Elliott was thrilled to be compared to the sinister character played by Orson Welles in Graham Greene’s
The Third Man
, and adopted it as his soubriquet. He joined a firm of stockbrokers, but found himself ‘incapable of leading that kind of life without relapsing into a slough of depression and boredom’ and soon gave it up, to pursue a life of esoteric and eccentric interests.

Elliott bought a share in a racehorse, and never missed a day of Ascot. He watched a great deal of cricket, and built up a fine wine cellar. He became interested in graphology, the pseudo-scientific study of handwriting, and found he had a ‘gift for dowsing’, the ability to locate underground water, ore and gems. He could be frequently seen marching across the countryside of the Home Counties with his divining rods, and then energetically digging holes. He approached MI6 with a plan to exhume buried Nazi treasure from the grounds of a monastery in Rome. He also took up transcendental meditation, which he considered a spiritual ‘alternative to involvement in religion’. Klop Ustinov turned up at Wilton Street from time to time, with hot veal kidneys
à la liégeoise
, in a hat box. Elliott’s daughter Claudia died tragically young but, as ever, his stiff upper lip precluded public grief. He spent much of his time in clubs, where he was admired as a raconteur of risqué anecdotes, the conversational refuge of the Englishman who does not know quite what to say, or cannot say what he really knows. He was no longer in the inner ring, but he did not yet abandon the secret world.

In the early 1980s, a tall, spare figure in an immaculate three-piece suit could be seen from time to time slipping without fanfare into Number Ten, Downing Street. Nicholas Elliott had become – no one was quite sure how – an unofficial adviser on intelligence matters to Margaret Thatcher. What was discussed during these meetings has never been fully revealed, and Elliott was far too discreet to say, but his political antennae were impeccable: after the break up of the Soviet Union, he correctly predicted the emergence of an authoritarian government in Russia; he foresaw the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of Iranian aggression, and the growing economic and political clout of China. Thatcher undoubtedly shared his view that post-imperial Britain was ‘showing a quite unjustified lack of self-confidence’. The costume of an
éminence grise
fitted him well.

As Elliott aged, the pain of Philby’s perfidy ebbed. Unlike Angleton, he would not allow Philby’s ghost to torment and destroy him. He came to see the way he had been duped not as a mark of shame, but as a badge of honour. Philby had been able to manipulate Elliott’s loyal constancy, his adherence to an old code of behaviour, as a weapon against him, and there was no dishonour in that. Yet he never ceased to wonder how someone who had been raised and educated as he had, someone he had known ‘extremely well over an extended period’, could have chosen such a radically different path. ‘I have naturally given thought to the motivations behind treachery,’ he wrote. In later life, he found himself trying to understand ‘Philby the man, and make some form of analysis of the personality that evolved.’ Whenever he reflected on the lives Philby had wasted, his anger welled up. ‘Outwardly he was a kindly man. Inwardly he must have been cold, calculating and cruel – traits which he cleverly concealed from his friends and colleagues. He undoubtedly had a high opinion of himself concealed behind a veil of false modesty and thus a firm streak of egocentricity.’ Philby had been a two-sided man, Elliott concluded, and he had only ever seen one, beguiling side, ‘a façade, in a schizophrenic personality with a supreme talent for deception’.

Though part of Elliott detested Philby, he also mourned him. He recalled Philby’s small kindnesses, the devotion he inspired in others, his enchanting mischief. He imagined him living a ‘sad exiled life’ in Moscow, with ‘dreary people, a spying servant, drab clothes’ and felt a twinge of something like sympathy for a man of rare talents, whose life had been ‘wasted in a futile cause’, who had ‘decided to betray his friends, his family, and country for a creed that is now universally discredited’. He missed the spark that had drawn him to Philby on the very first day they met in 1940. ‘He had charm to burn,’ he wrote, with a reluctant wistfulness. ‘He is said to have it still.’

Philby also found his thoughts turning to Elliott in old age, and reached the firm conclusion that he had been manoeuvred into fleeing Beirut: ‘The whole thing was staged so as to push me into escaping.’ Elliott had been motivated by the ‘desire to spare SIS another spy scandal in London’, and had unloaded him on Moscow.

As the Cold War raged, Philby was used as a propaganda tool by both sides. The Soviets set out to prove that he was living, in the words of one apologist, a life in Moscow of ‘blissful peace’. In 1968, with KGB approval (and editing), he published a memoir,
My Silent War
, a blend of fact and fiction, history and disinformation, which depicted Soviet intelligence as uniformly brilliant, and himself as a hero of ideological constancy. Political voices in the West insisted that the reverse was true, and that Philby, drunken, depressed and disillusioned, was getting his just deserts for a life of betrayal and adherence to a diabolical doctrine. US President Ronald Reagan declared: ‘How sleepless must be Kim Philby’s nights in Moscow . . . how profoundly he and others like him must be aware that the people they betrayed are going to be victors in the end.’ One former MI5 officer even claimed to know what was going through Philby’s mind when he did fall asleep: ‘He’s a totally sad man, dreaming of a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door.’

The truth was somewhere in between. Philby was deeply unhappy during the early years in Soviet Russia, a place Burgess had memorably described as ‘like Glasgow on a Saturday night in Victorian times’. The affair with Melinda soon fizzled out; she returned to Maclean, and then left the USSR for good. Philby drank heavily, often alone, and suffered from chronic insomnia. He would later admit that his life became ‘burdensome’. At some point he tried to end it, by slashing his wrists. But in 1970, his spirits began to lift when George Blake, his fellow exile, introduced him to Rufina Ivanovna, a Russian woman of Polish extraction twenty years his junior, who would become his fourth wife. The KGB sent them a tea set of English bone china as a wedding present. The lingering suspicion of the Soviet intelligence service cleared, and in 1977, Philby gave a lecture to KGB officers, in which he insisted that the secret agent should admit nothing under interrogation, and on no account provide a confession. ‘Any confession involves giving information to the enemy. It is therefore – by definition – wrong.’ Some of his audience must have known that Philby had himself confessed to Nicholas Elliott back in 1963. They were much too tactful to point this out.

Philby’s last years were quiet, dutiful and domesticated. Rufina tried to wean him off the booze, with only partial success. He did odd jobs for the Soviet state, including the training of KGB recruits and helping to motivate the Soviet hockey team – even though, as Elliott once noted, he was addicted to cricket and ‘showed no interest whatsoever in any other sort of sport’. He was awarded the Order of Lenin, which he compared to a knighthood, ‘one of the better ones’. In return, he never criticised the system he had supported all his adult life, never acknowledged the true character of the organisation he had served, and never uttered a word of remorse. In the officially approved Soviet style, he maintained that any errors in practical communism lay not with the ideas, but with the people executing them.

Philby died in a Moscow hospital on 11 May 1988. He was given a grand funeral with a KGB honour guard, buried at Kuntsevo cemetery outside Moscow, and lauded for his ‘tireless struggle in the cause of peace and a brighter future’. He was commemorated with a Soviet postage stamp. In 2011, the Russian foreign intelligence service put up a plaque with two faces of Kim Philby facing one another in profile, an inadvertently apt monument to a man with two sides to his head.

Elliott hatched a plan for a different sort of memorial. He recommended to MI6 that Philby be awarded the CMG, the order of St Michael and St George, the sixth most prestigious award in the British honours system, awarded to men and women who render extraordinary or important non-military service in a foreign country. Elliott further suggested that he write a signed obituary note to accompany the award, in which he would say only: ‘My lips have hitherto been sealed but I can now reveal that Philby was one of the bravest men I have ever known.’ The implication would be clear to Moscow: Philby had been acting for Britain all along; he was not a valiant Soviet double agent, but a heroic British triple agent, and Elliott had been his spymaster. The idea that Philby had fooled the KGB would cause ‘a tremendous fluttering in the dovecotes of the Lubyanka’, Elliott wrote, and inflict the most gratifying posthumous revenge. It would be a splendid tease at Philby’s expense, to which he could have no answer. Elliott’s proposal was turned down. The new-style MI6 did not do jokes.

As his own end approached, Elliott reflected on a life that had been ‘undistinguished, albeit mildly notorious’, and tremendous fun.

He had known indignity, misfortune and intimate betrayal, but his fund of natural optimism never ran out. ‘I feel I have been extraordinarily lucky,’ he wrote. ‘I look back on my career with some wonderment.’

Elliott kept a part of Philby with him always. He treasured the old umbrella he had bought so many years ago, in admiring imitation of his closest friend, and his worst enemy. When Elliott died in 1994, he left behind a short memoir, mostly consisting of off-colour stories, with a rueful, self-mocking title:
Never Judge a Man by His Umbrella
.

It was a joke that only two people could have fully appreciated: Nicholas Elliott, and Kim Philby.

See Notes on Chapter 20

Afterword

John le Carré

‘God, it would be good to be a fake somebody, rather than a real nobody’

Mike Tyson, world heavyweight boxing champion

Nicholas Elliott of MI6 was the most charming, witty, elegant, courteous, compulsively entertaining spy I ever met. In retrospect, he also remains the most enigmatic. To describe his appearance is, these days, to invite ridicule. He was a
bon viveur
of the old school. I never once saw him in anything but an immaculately cut, dark three-piece suit. He had perfect Etonian manners, and delighted in human relationships.

He was thin as a wand, and seemed always to hover slightly above the ground at a jaunty angle, a quiet smile on his face and one elbow cocked for the Martini glass or cigarette.

His waistcoats curved inwards, never outwards. He looked like a P. G. Wodehouse man-about-town, and spoke like one, with the difference that his conversation was startlingly forthright, knowledgeable, and recklessly disrespectful of authority.

During my service in MI6, Elliott and I had been on nodding terms at most. When I was first interviewed for the Service, he was on the selection board. When I became a new entrant, he was a fifth-floor grandee whose most celebrated espionage coup – the wartime recruitment of a highly placed member of the German Abwehr in Istanbul, smuggling him and his wife to Britain – was held up to trainees as the ultimate example of what a resourceful field officer could achieve.

And he remained that same glamorous, remote figure throughout my service. Flitting elegantly in and out of head office, he would deliver a lecture, attend an operational conference, down a few glasses in the grandees’ bar, and be gone.

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.