A Spy Among Friends (50 page)

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.’