A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

8

Rising Stars

With the coming of peace, the denizens of the secret world emerged onto a new political landscape fraught with uncertainty, and ripe with opportunity. James Angleton, anti-communist to the core, was elated at the prospect of doing battle with the Soviet spy machine. ‘I believed we were in the dawn of a new millennium,’ he later recalled. Nicholas Elliott moved easily from loathing Nazism to hating communism; both threatened the British way of life he cherished, and both were therefore evil. In Elliott’s mind, the threat from Russia represented a stark choice: ‘The continuation of a civilization mainly fit to live in, or Armageddon.’ For Kim Philby, too, the political frontiers shifted, though his convictions altered not at all. For most of the war, he had spied on behalf of Britain’s ally; now he was spying for Britain’s sworn enemy, and from within the very heart of the British intelligence machine.

Elliott plunged into his role as Britain’s spy chief in spy-saturated Switzerland with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy – which, in many ways, he remained. He was now a husband, a father (a son, Mark, would arrive in 1947) and a career intelligence officer, an MI6 professional with weighty responsibilities, yet there was still something boyish about him, an engaging combination of worldliness and naivety, as he waded cheerily through the moral and ethical quicksand of espionage. He found the challenge of intelligence-gathering not merely enjoyable, but frequently absurd. ‘I’m in it for the belly-laughs,’ he said. He knew his tendency to see the funny side in the worst situations was ‘a form of defence mechanism’, a way of holding back reality with jokes, the dirtier the better. Elliott’s character was a distinctly English combination of the staid and the unconventional, conservatism and oddity: he was popular with colleagues, for he was unfailingly courteous, and never raised his voice. ‘Verbal abuse is not the right course of action,’ he once reflected. ‘Except perhaps in dealing with Germans.’ Elliott could not abide bureaucracy, administration or rules. His knack for intelligence-gathering relied on personal contact, risk, hunch, and what he called ‘the British tradition of somehow muddling through despite the odds’. Jocular, old-fashioned and eccentric, Elliott struck some as a posh bumbler. It was a useful disguise.

As he had in Istanbul, Elliott gathered around him a collection of more or less motley characters, agents, informers and tipsters; he cultivated new friends, and imported old ones. ‘One of the joys of living in Switzerland in the immediate post-war period was to be able to have friends out to stay from deprived England and feed them up.’ The spare bedroom in Dufourstrasse became temporary home to a succession of British and American spies criss-crossing Europe. Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s chum who had eased Philby into Section V, came to stay in 1946, and was very nearly immolated when a waitress in Elliott’s favourite restaurant attempted to flambé an omelette at the table by pouring brandy onto a heated pan, causing a violent explosion that set fire to the hair of a Swedish diner. Elliott extinguished her with three glasses of white wine. Philby made a point of stopping off in Switzerland during his regular tours of Europe, for working holidays with Elliott involving copious drink, Swiss cuisine and spy gossip. Another frequent visitor was Peter Lunn, one of Elliott’s ‘oldest and closest friends’ from Eton. Slight, blue-eyed and with a pronounced lisp, Lunn had joined MI6 at the same time as Elliott in 1939, but on the whole he preferred skiing to spying. The Lunns were ‘British skiing aristocracy’: Peter’s grandfather was a former missionary who spent a lifetime preaching the joys of skiing, and founded the ski travel company that still bears his name; his father successfully campaigned to have downhill skiing recognised as an Olympic sport, and Peter himself captained the British ski team at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Under Lunn’s instruction, Elliott took to the sport with a typical combination of enthusiasm and recklessness. Where his father had climbed mountains slowly, Elliott discovered the thrill of sliding down them as fast as possible. Most weekends he could be found on the slopes of Wengen or St Moritz. Elliott’s life in Berne was rendered still more pleasurable by the arrival of Klop Ustinov, his old friend and mentor from The Hague. After successfully extracting the spy Wolfgang zu Putlitz from the clutches of the Gestapo, the part-Jewish, part-Ethiopian Russian with the upper-class English accent had spent a fascinating war working for British intelligence, most recently in Germany where, in the uniform of a British colonel, he had proved to be ‘the ideal person to be entrusted with the interrogation of Nazi suspects’. In 1946, Ustinov was sent to Berne to work with Elliott on ‘attempting to piece together a picture of the post-war Soviet intelligence networks in Europe’. Elliott was delighted to be reunited with this spherical, jovial man, whose eye permanently twinkled with merriment behind his monocle. Klop believed that life was a ‘superficial existence’, an attitude of mind which fused perfectly with Elliott’s frivolity and taste for danger. The Elliott–Ustinov partnership proved extraordinarily effective, but rather fattening: a fine chef, Klop tended to turn up unexpectedly, carrying rognons de veau à la liégoise inside a leather top-hat case.

Elliott and Ustinov focused first on the remnants of the wartime Soviet spy system in Switzerland, notably the network codenamed the Rote Kapelle, which at its height had run some 117 agents, including forty-eight inside Germany, producing high-grade intelligence. One of the most important members of the network was British, a young communist named Alexander Foote. Born in Derbyshire, Foote had served in the RAF before deserting to join the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Shortly before the Second World War he was recruited by Soviet military intelligence and sent to Switzerland as a radio operator for the fledgling Rote Kapelle. In January 1945, Foote moved to Moscow, convinced his interrogators of his continued loyalty, and was redeployed to the Soviet sector of post-war Berlin under the pseudonym ‘Major Grantov’. There, in July 1947, he defected to the British. Foote produced a detailed picture of Soviet intelligence methods, offering a ‘unique opportunity to study the methodology of a Soviet network’, from which Elliott and Ustinov were able to draw up a ‘blueprint for communist activities during the Cold War’. Foote’s debriefing contained some deeply worrying elements, most notably the revelation that Moscow had many long-term, deeply embedded spies in Britain, some of whom had been recruited long before the war. Elliott and Ustinov concluded that most of these spies were ‘lifelong communist activists’, but not necessarily with any overt connection to the party.

*

James Angleton had come to see the task of combating Soviet espionage as ‘not so much an ideology, as a way of life’. In the last years of war and the first years of peace, Angleton’s agents pervaded every corner of Italy, the civil service, armed forces, intelligence services and political parties, including the Soviet-backed Italian Communist Party. Like Elliott, Angleton cultivated a brand of high eccentricity: he gave his agents botanical codenames, such as Fig, Rose or Tomato, and sported a fur cape with a high collar, which made him look ‘like a British actor emulating a thirties spy’. Behind his back, colleagues called him ‘the cadaver’ and wondered at his strangeness. ‘The guy was just in another world,’ said one. But he was good. By 1946, he had successfully penetrated no fewer than seven foreign intelligence services, and had a roster of more than fifty active informants – most of them quite dodgy, and some of them entirely so. Among the most glamorous, and least trustworthy, was Princess Maria Pignatelli, the widow of an Italian marquis with links to Mussolini who had offered her services to the OSS as an informant on what remained of Italian fascism. Angleton discovered, however, that she had previously been in contact with the German intelligence service; he was never sure how far he could trust the spy he knew, with only limited affection, as ‘Princess Pig’. Even more dubious was Virgilio Scattolini, a corpulent Italian journalist who wrote bestselling, semi-pornographic novels, including one entitled, rather unenticingly, Amazons in the Bidet. This sideline did not prevent him from obtaining a job on the Vatican newspaper. In 1944, he offered to supply the OSS in Rome with Vatican diplomatic documents and cable traffic, including copies of reports from the papal nuncio in Tokyo, who was in direct contact with senior Japanese officials. Angleton paid Scattolini a princely retainer of $500 a month. His reports were sent straight to Roosevelt, and were considered so secret that only the President or Secretary of State could authorise access to them. Angleton, however, began to have doubts when it emerged that Scattolini was hawking similar material to other intelligence organisations, including MI6. The crunch came when Scattolini reported a conversation between the Japanese envoy to the Holy See and his American counterpart, which the State Department discovered had never taken place. Scattolini was making it up, and he continued to do so, even after he was sacked by Angleton. In 1948 he was imprisoned for fabricating two entire volumes purporting to be the ‘Secret Documents of Vatican Diplomacy’.

The Scattolini episode was deeply embarrassing, the first blemish on Angleton’s career. It also ingrained his natural propensity for extreme suspicion. His time in Britain, observing the successful Double Cross operation against the Germans, had taught Angleton ‘how vulnerable even the most supposedly secure counter-intelligence service is to clandestine penetration’. On reflection, he wondered whether Scattolini might have been a Soviet double agent, deployed to plant damaging disinformation. The duplicity of spies like Princess Pig and Virgilio Scattolini seemed to reinforce Angleton’s distrust of all but a few intimates; he became increasingly obsessed with double agents and ‘the Byzantine possibilities open to the counter-intelligence practitioner’. On Angleton’s visits to Berne, Elliott noted his American friend’s deepening mistrust, his compulsive compilation of secret files, his adherence to secrecy as a sort of religion. Every day, Angleton scoured his Rome office for bugs, ‘crawling around on his hands and knees’, convinced the Soviets were attempting to listen in on his conversations, just as he was eavesdropping on theirs. ‘His real love was unravelling the web of deception, penetration and general intrigue woven by the KGB,’ wrote Elliott. ‘Above all, he loved secrecy, perhaps even secrecy for its own sake.’

Angleton’s only real intimacy was with other spies, and he later remarked on the way friendship, secrecy and professional comradeship seemed to merge during his years in Rome. ‘We were . . . damned good friends,’ he later said. ‘I feel that’s the only way you can keep a service going.’ There was rivalry between the American and British services in many parts of the world, but Angleton and Elliott kept few secrets from one another, and fewer still from Kim Philby.

During one of Philby’s visits to Rome, Angleton described one of his proudest achievements: a bugging device planted in the offices of Palmiro Togliatti, the veteran leader of the Italian Communist Party. Togliatti had spent the war in the Soviet Union, making radio broadcasts urging Italian communists to resist the Nazis, before returning to Italy after the fall of Mussolini to serve in a democratic government of national unity. Togliatti’s links with Moscow rendered him deeply suspect in American eyes, and Angleton boasted that he was recording every word spoken in the communist leader’s office. A few weeks later, Boris Krötenschield sent a message to Moscow Centre: ‘Stanley reported that the counter-intelligence section of the OSS in Italy has set up a microphone in the building where Togliatti works, thanks to which they can monitor all conversations in that building.’

In the autumn of 1946, Philby announced that he was marrying Aileen Furse – news that came as a shock to both Elliott and Angleton, who had always assumed that the mother of Philby’s children was already his wife. Philby had hitherto refused to marry Aileen, despite her entreaties, for the simple reason that he was already married, to a foreign communist. But as he rose within MI6, Philby concluded that this particular skeleton, in a cupboard packed with such things, would have to be revealed. He approached Valentine Vivian, the man who had so casually waved him into the service in the first place, and explained that, as an impetuous youth, he had married a left-wing Austrian, whom he now planned to divorce in order to make an honest woman of Aileen. The revelation does not seem to have given Vee-Vee a moment’s concern.

Philby contacted Litzi, now living in Paris, arranged an uncontested and amicable divorce, and married Aileen a week later, on 25 September, in a civil ceremony at Chelsea registry office. Elliott, occupied with his duties in Switzerland, was unable to attend, but sent an enormous bouquet of flowers and a crate of champagne. The witnesses were Tommy Harris, the MI5 double agent-runner, and Flora Solomon, Philby’s friend and Aileen’s former employer, who had brought them together in 1939. The wedding party then repaired to the Philby family home in Carlyle Square for a bibulous party that lasted long into the night. Many friends and colleagues from MI6 turned up and drank to a delayed marriage that fitted Philby’s faintly bohemian image. One senior MI6 colleague, Jack Easton, who would go on to become deputy director, observed Kim’s obvious pride in his growing family, and reflected: ‘What a very nice chap Kim must be!’ Flora Solomon felt an almost proprietorial pride in the ‘happy ending’ for the young couple: ‘Kim, a happy and devoted father, was making a successful career in the Foreign Office, and Aileen seemed stable and content.’ As for Philby’s early communism, Solomon reflected, that ‘seemed to belong to the misty, juvenile past’.

Philby told Aileen nothing about his MI6 work, let alone his activities on behalf of Soviet intelligence. She knew only that he worked for the Foreign Office. But she, too, was concealing something. For years, unknown to Philby, she had suffered from a psychiatric disorder, later known as Münchausen’s syndrome, that manifested itself in episodes of self-harm and bouts of pyromania in order to attract sympathy and attention. As a teenager she had opened an appendix wound and infected it with her own urine, considerably prolonging her recovery. ‘Awkward of her gestures and unsure of herself in company,’ Aileen’s mental health was deteriorating, and the ‘accidents’ and illnesses were multiplying. Perhaps Aileen’s distress reflected the first stirrings of doubt; she may already have begun to wonder whether her husband was really the charming, uxorious, popular, straight-batting bureaucrat that he seemed. He tended to vanish without warning or explanation, sometimes disappearing for twenty-four hours at a time, returning hungover and tight-lipped. Aileen came from a conventional background, of Girl Guides, colonial servants, marital vows and simple patriotism. Flora Solomon considered her ‘incapable of disloyalty, either personal or political’, but Aileen would not have been human had she not begun to suspect that her husband might be seeing someone else. If she did have her doubts, she told nobody. Mrs Philby, the former undercover detective at M&S, was also good at keeping secrets.

Philby’s decision to regularise his domestic arrangements was a sound career move, if he was to become head of MI6. Elliott harboured similar ambitions. But while Elliott had already spent time in the field, in Istanbul and Berne, Philby had so far spent most of his intelligence career behind a desk. Late in 1946, Menzies informed Philby that in order to gain ‘all round experience’, he would be following in Elliott’s footsteps, to Turkey, as MI6 station chief. Section IX was taken over by Douglas Roberts, the veteran officer whose fear of flying had enabled Philby to seize control of the Volkov case. Guy Liddell of MI5 was ‘profoundly sorry’ to learn that Philby was leaving London, and doubted his successor would be as good. But Philby was happy to be moving on. Istanbul was the ‘main southern base for intelligence work against the Soviet Union and socialist countries of the Balkans and central Europe’, and his new assignment was a further sign that he was heading for the top. ‘Kim gave a large farewell party,’ Liddell of MI5 recorded in his diary, ‘which consisted mostly of representatives of our office, SIS and the Americans. He is off to Turkey.’

On his way, Philby stopped in Switzerland to see Elliott, who provided him with a detailed briefing on what to expect in Istanbul, and handed over the contents of his contact book. Istanbul’s significance as a spy centre was even greater in 1947 than it had been during the war. Tension was mounting between Turkey and the USSR amid fears of a full-scale confrontation between East and West; from Turkey, Western intelligence sought to infiltrate spies and insurgents into the Soviet Union, and vice versa. Before leaving London, Philby had been told that if the opportunity arose, he could set himself up as a ‘coat trailer’, spy parlance for an agent who seeks to be recruited by the enemy, in order to turn double agent. Philby was ‘given permission to play the full double game with the Russians’. Here was an additional layer of protection: if Philby was discovered to be in contact with the Soviets, he had a cast-iron explanation.

Philby landed at the very airport from which, two years earlier, the luckless and insensible Konstantin Volkov had been flown to his death. He rented a villa in Beylerbeyi, on the shores of the Bosphorus, installed his growing family and then, armed with Elliott’s introductions, slipped easily into the spy society of Istanbul. He even inherited the services of Elliott’s best man, Roman Sudakov, ‘a white Russian of boundless charm and appalling energy’ in Philby’s estimation. The Turkish authorities, when adequately bribed, still allowed foreign intelligence agencies ‘a fairly free hand to spy, so long as they didn’t spy on Turkey’. Over the next two years, Philby and his five deputies liaised with the Turkish security services, cultivated exiles, trailed for defectors, coordinated British agents and conducted a topographical survey of the Turkish frontier with the Soviet Union – a possible target of invasion in the event of war. But his first priority was to try to infiltrate agents into the USSR along a broad front, into the Caucasus, Ukraine, the Crimea, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. MI6 believed that Soviet Armenia and Soviet Georgia, in particular, were ripe for subversion. Hundreds of Georgian and Armenian émigrés had fled communism to settle in Beirut, Paris and other Western cities; if the right candidates could be found, trained and then slipped across the borders, these insurrectionists might form the kernel of a counter-revolutionary cell that could ‘start weaving a spy network’, foment rebellion against the communist government, recruit local allies and eventually roll back the Red tide. That, at least, was the theory. Such infiltrations would loom ever larger in the thinking of MI6 and the CIA in coming years, as the policy of ‘roll-back’ became intelligence orthodoxy. Philby was an ‘energetic enthusiast’ for this policy of war by proxy within the Soviet Union. He found his new assignment fascinating. So did Moscow.

Philby did not make direct contact with Soviet intelligence in Istanbul. Instead, he sent whatever information he gleaned to Guy Burgess, now working at the Foreign Office, who passed it on to the Soviets. With one hand Philby set up infiltration operations, and with the other he unpicked them. Moscow knew exactly what to do with Philby’s information: ‘We knew in advance about every operation that took place, by air, land or sea, even in the mountainous and inaccessible regions.’

Angleton was also moving on, and up. The Central Intelligence Agency was formally established in September 1947. Three months later, after three years in Rome, Angleton returned to Washington to take up a new role in the Office of Special Operations (OSO), with responsibility for espionage and counter-espionage. Reunited with his long-suffering wife and their young son, Angleton set up home in the Virginia suburbs, and on New Year’s Eve he formally applied to join the CIA, the intelligence organisation he would serve, shape and dominate for almost three decades.

The OSO was the intelligence-gathering division within the fledgling CIA, and from here Angleton began to carve out his own empire, working day and night, driving himself, his colleagues and his secretaries with manic determination. He started in a small office, with a single secretary; within a year he had been promoted, rated ‘excellent’, and awarded a pay rise and a much larger office; two years later he was deploying six secretaries and assistants, and amassing a vast registry of files on the British model, which would become ‘the very mechanism through which the CIA organised the secret war against the Soviet Union’. As that war expanded, so did Angleton’s power. ‘He was totally consumed by his work. There was no room for anything else,’ said his secretary. At weekends he fished, usually alone, or tended his orchids. Astonishingly, Cicely not only put up with his peculiarities, but loved him for them. ‘We rediscovered each other,’ she recalled. For all his eccentricities, there was something deeply romantic about the gaunt-faced, half-Mexican, hard-drinking poet-spy who cultivated his secrets, in private, like the rarest blooms.

If the Angletons’ marriage was now on firmer ground, that of the Philbys, outwardly so solid, was beginning to come apart. Aileen Philby had become convinced that her husband was having an affair with his secretary, Edith Whitfield, who was young, pretty, and a friend of Guy Burgess, whom Aileen deeply disliked. As he had in London, Philby would sometimes disappear overnight without warning or explanation. On his trips around the country, Edith always accompanied him. Aileen’s suspicions, almost certainly justified, tipped her into deeper depression. She became seriously ill. Secretly, she injected herself with urine, causing her body to erupt with boils. Her health became so precarious that after ten months in Istanbul, she had to be hospitalised. While in the clinic she was badly burned, after a fire mysteriously started in her bedroom.

Aileen was back in Beylerbeyi, and seemed to be recovering, when Philby arrived home one evening and announced with a grin: ‘I’ve got sitting in my Jeep outside one of the most disreputable members of the British Foreign Office.’ Guy Burgess had arrived, unannounced, for a holiday. He would stay for almost a month. The two old chums and fellow spies painted the town a deep shade of red, with Edith Whitfield in tow. In a single evening at the Moda Yacht Club, they polished off fifty-two brandies. At the end of the evening Burgess could be heard singing, to the tune of Verdi’s ‘La Donna è Mobile’:

Little boys are cheap today

Cheaper than yesterday

Small boys are half a crown

Standing up or lying down

Excluded from the revelries, deeply suspicious, and upset by the presence in her home of this drunken reprobate to whom her husband seemed so deeply attached, Aileen was heading for complete breakdown.

Philby did not seem unduly concerned, or even aware of the impending crisis. He was the same charming, cheerful figure, roué enough to raise the eyebrows of the more strait-laced members of the diplomatic fraternity, but not nearly so wicked as to damage his career prospects in the secret service. In the eyes of MI6, ‘He was both efficient and safe.’ And besides, he was doing important work, taking the fight to the Reds, even if the results of his efforts to penetrate the Soviet Union were proving less than successful.

A meeting in Switzerland (probably arranged by Elliott), with a Turk representing a number of exiled groups from Georgia and Armenia, secured a verbal agreement that MI6 would be ‘willing to back them with training and finance’ if the émigrés could furnish suitable counter-revolutionaries. But finding the right people to foment rebellion behind the Iron Curtain was proving tricky: many had been born abroad, or exiled for so long they barely knew their native countries, while others were tainted by association with Nazi efforts to destabilise the USSR during the war. Philby originally envisaged sending half a dozen groups of five or six ‘insurrectionists’ into Soviet Georgia and Soviet Armenia for several weeks at a time. Finally, among the exiled Georgian community in Paris, just two candidates were selected: ‘energetic lads’ aged twenty, who were ready to undertake this mission to a homeland neither had ever seen. One was called Rukhadze; the name of the other has never been discovered.

The two young men were trained in London for six weeks and then despatched to Istanbul, to be met by Philby. The operation, codenamed ‘Climber’, was a ‘tip-and-run’ exercise, an exploratory foray to assess the possibilities of mounting a rebellion in Georgia: the two agents would establish communication lines with potential anti-communist rebels, and then slip across the border back into Turkey. The young men struck Philby as ‘alert and intelligent’, convinced they were striking a blow to liberate Georgia from Soviet oppression. One of them, however, perhaps realising he faced certain death if caught, seemed ‘notably subdued’. The party travelled to Erzurum in Eastern Turkey, where Philby bustled around briefing the two agents, and issuing them with weapons, radio equipment and a bag of gold coins. ‘It was essential I should be seen doing everything possible to ensure the success of the operation,’ he later wrote. He had, of course, ensured exactly the opposite. The spot chosen for the infiltration was Posof, in the far northeast of Turkey on the border with Georgia. In the dead of night, the pair were taken to a remote section of the frontier, and slipped into Soviet territory.

Within minutes, a burst of gunfire rang out from the Georgian side. One of the men went down in the first volley. The other, Rukhadze, was spotted in the half-light, ‘striding through a sparse wood away from the Turkish frontier’. He did not get far, and was soon in the hands of Soviet intelligence. It is doubtful whether the torturers got much out of him before he died; he had little to reveal. Years later, Philby discussed the fate of the Georgians with the chief of the Georgian KGB: ‘The boys weren’t bad,’ he said. ‘Not at all. I knew very well that they would be caught and that a tragic fate awaited them. But on the other hand it was the only way of driving a stake through the plans of future operations.’ This ill-conceived, badly planned operation might well have failed anyway; but Philby could not have killed them more certainly if he had executed them himself. Their deaths did not trouble him, now or later. If there was a blot on his happy horizon, it was the increasingly erratic behaviour of his wife.

*

One evening in March 1949, Aileen Philby was found lying beside a country road with a gash in her head. When she regained consciousness, she explained that while taking a walk she had been viciously attacked by a Turkish man, who hit her with a rock. Several potential culprits were rounded up and brought to her hospital bedside ‘in chains’, but Aileen could not positively identify her assailant. The Turkish police were baffled; so were the doctors when septicaemia set in. Aileen was now extremely unwell. In this moment of crisis, Philby turned to his old friend.

Philby contacted Nicholas Elliott in Berne and told him that Aileen seemed to be ‘dying of some mysterious ailment’. Would Elliott find a Swiss doctor who could discover what was wrong with her? Elliott sprang into action. After an intensive trawl, he told Philby he had found just the man: a distinguished Swiss medical professor who had listened to Aileen’s symptoms and believed he could cure her. The Philbys immediately flew to Geneva, and travelled on by ambulance to Berne: Aileen was settled into a comfortable clinic, while Philby moved in with the Elliotts. Just days after her arrival, Aileen tried to set her room on fire, and then slashed her arm with a razor blade. The Swiss doctor swiftly established that Aileen’s original injury had been self-inflicted, then self-infected. The story of the roadside attack was fictitious. Aileen’s doctor in London, Lord Horder, confirmed a history of self-harm dating back to her teenage years, and Aileen was committed to a psychiatric clinic under close observation. Elliott was deeply shocked to discover that this ‘charming woman and loving wife and mother suffered, unknown to others, from a grave mental problem’. The Elliotts nursed her with tender solicitude; Nicholas Elliott sat at her bedside, feeding her grapes and jokes. Slowly, Aileen regained her strength, and a measure of mental composure.

Philby was livid, a reaction that struck Elliott as distinctly odd. He had expected Philby to be relieved that his wife had been diagnosed at last. Instead, his friend complained bitterly that Aileen had hoodwinked him, and vowed he would never forgive her. ‘It was an intense affront to Philby’s pride,’ Elliott concluded, that he, an intelligence professional schooled in deception, ‘had been tricked for so many years’ by his own wife. ‘He had to return to Istanbul knowing that all the years he had been living with Aileen, he had himself been deceived.’ Elliott would never have criticised Philby, particularly with regard to women. He knew about Philby’s extra-marital affairs, and passed no judgement. Indeed, Elliott had his own mistress, a Swedish woman he kept carefully hidden from Elizabeth. A chap’s marriage was his own business, and in Nick Elliott’s eyes Kim Philby could do no wrong. Still, it seemed strange that his friend should be so angered by a deception that was, in the end, medical rather than moral. From that moment on, Elliott reflected sadly, ‘the marriage steadily deteriorated’.

Aileen had been back in Istanbul less than a month when Philby announced that the family was on the move again: he had been offered, and had accepted, one of the most important jobs in British intelligence, as the MI6 chief in Washington DC.

*

The Berlin Blockade had thrown the escalating Cold War tension into sharp relief, and the power balance in the intelligence relationship between Britain and the US was shifting. The time when MI6 could patronise the American amateurs, new to the game of espionage, was long gone, and in Whitehall Britain’s spy chiefs wrestled with the novel and uncomfortable sensation that the Americans were now calling the shots, running a new kind of war against the Soviets, and paying the bills for it. For most of the Second World War, the US had been the junior partner on intelligence issues, grateful to follow the British lead. That relationship was now reversing, but the veterans of MI6 were determined to prove that Britain was still a master of the intelligence game, despite mounting evidence of an empire in steep decline. One way to stop the rot was to send a young star to Washington, a decorated wartime intelligence hero with a dazzling record, as living proof that British intelligence was just as vigorous and effective as it had always been.

In the US, Philby would be responsible for maintaining the Anglo-American intelligence relationship, liaising with the CIA and the FBI, and even handling secret communications between the British Prime Minister and the President. MI6 could hardly have offered him a more emphatic vote of confidence. Philby’s had been one of three names in the running for this coveted post, and it had been left to the Americans to choose their preferred candidate. According to CIA historian Ray Cline, ‘It was James Jesus Angleton who selected Philby’s name.’

Aileen was not consulted about the new job. Philby did not even wait for the approval of his Soviet handlers. He accepted this irresistible new posting exactly half an hour after it was offered. ‘At one stroke, it would take me right back into the middle of intelligence policy making and it would give me a close-up view of the American intelligence organisations,’ he wrote. It also offered ‘unlimited possibilities’ for fresh espionage on behalf of his Soviet masters.

News of Philby’s appointment was greeted with sadness by his colleagues in Istanbul, who had grown used to his combination of conviviality and efficiency. ‘Who am I supposed to work with now?’ wondered the ambassador, Sir David Kelly. In London, the appointment was seen as a natural progression for a man destined for the top. Elliott was delighted, and if he felt a twinge of envy that his friend seemed to be climbing the ladder faster than he was, he was much too British to show it.

Philby flew back to London in early September to be briefed on his new role. He made a point of looking up old contacts in both MI5 and MI6, and inviting each of them to come and stay with him in Washington. ‘I was lunched at many clubs,’ he wrote. ‘Discussions over coffee and port covered many subjects.’ Those very same subjects were also discussed by Philby in a series of meetings, no less cheerful but even more clandestine, in various London parks. Boris Krötenschield was pleased by his agent’s new appointment, and deeply impressed by the dedication of this double-sided man: ‘One side is open to family and friends and everyone around them,’ Krötenschield reported to Moscow Centre. ‘The other belongs only to himself and his secret work.’

Much of Philby’s time in London was spent discussing Albania. Most citizens of Britain, America and the USSR, if they thought about Albania at all, imagined a wild country on the edge of Europe, a place of almost mythical irrelevance to the rest of the world. But Albania, sandwiched between Yugoslavia, Greece and the Adriatic, was poised to become a key Cold War battlefield. After the war, Albania’s King Zog was deposed as the country came under the iron rule of Enver Hoxha, the ruthless and wily leader of the communist partisans, who set about transforming Albania into a Stalinist state. By 1949, Albania presented a tempting target for the anti-communist hawks in British and American intelligence: separated from the Soviet bloc by Yugoslavia (itself split from the USSR), Albania was poor, feudal, sparsely populated and politically volatile. Many exiled Albanian royalists and nationalists were itching to return to their homeland and do battle with the communists. Viewed from London and Washington, through a veil of wishful thinking, Albania appeared ready to shake off communism: trained guerrillas would be slipped into Albania to link up with local rebel groups, eventually sparking civil war and toppling Hoxha. If Albanian communism was successfully undermined, it was believed, this would set off a ‘chain reaction that would roll back the tide of Soviet Imperialism’. The SOE had played an important role in Albania during the war, and it was therefore agreed that Britain should take the lead in training the Albanian rebels, with the US as an enthusiastic partner. Philby was fully briefed on the plans. The first wave of insurgents would be sent in by boat from Italy in October 1948; the mission was codenamed ‘Valuable’.

The Albanian operation was an example of gung-ho wartime thinking wrongly applied to the more nuanced circumstances of the Cold War. But within MI6 it was seen as the opening salvo in a new, covert war. Stalin had backed a communist insurgency in Greece, engineered the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, and blockaded Berlin. Albania would be the target of a counter-attack, in direct contravention of international law but in keeping with the new mood of aggression. Many greeted the prospect with glee. Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s friend in MI6, even imagined a situation whereby the Albanian campaign could spark ‘formal British and American armed intervention’. Philby would be responsible for coordinating Albanian plans with the Americans.

Before leaving for the US, Philby was indoctrinated, with due reverence, into perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the Cold War. Between 1940 and 1948, American cryptanalysts had intercepted some 3,000 Soviet intelligence telegrams written in a code that was, theoretically, unbreakable. In 1946, however, due to a single blunder by the Soviets, a team of codebreakers led by the brilliant American cryptanalyst Meredith Gardner began to unpick the messages that had passed between the US and Moscow. What they revealed was staggering: more than 200 Americans had become Soviet agents during the war; Moscow had spies in the Treasury, the State Department, the nuclear Manhattan Project and the OSS. The code-breaking operation, codenamed ‘Venona’ (a word which, appropriately, has no meaning) was so secret that President Truman himself was not informed of its existence for more than three years; the CIA did not learn about Venona until 1952. But it is a measure of the trust between the British and American intelligence agencies that news of the breakthrough, and its chilling implications, was immediately shared with MI6, because the intercepts also revealed that Soviet spies had penetrated the British government. In particular, the Venona team uncovered evidence of a Soviet agent, codenamed ‘Homer’, who was leaking secrets from within the British embassy in Washington in 1945. The identity of this mole was still a mystery, but it was assumed that, like ‘Cicero’ in Turkey during the war, ‘Homer’ was probably an embassy employee, a cleaner perhaps, or a clerk. Philby knew better: Donald Maclean, his Cambridge friend and fellow spy, had been first secretary at the Washington embassy between 1944 and 1948. Maclean was Homer.

The first flicker of a shadow, as yet no more than a mote in the far distance, fell across Philby’s long and sunny run of luck.

See Notes on Chapter 8