A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

16

A Most Promising Officer

St John Philby, that rebel traditionalist, attended an Orientalists’ conference in Moscow in the summer of 1960, then the Lord’s cricket test match in London, in which England trounced South Africa, much to his satisfaction. On his way back to Saudi Arabia, he stopped off to visit his son in Beirut. At sixty-five, St John was as cantankerous and complicated as ever. He checked in to the Normandie Hotel, where he was ‘treated with the deference due to an Eastern potentate’. Nicholas Elliott threw a lunch party for him, not without trepidation, knowing the elder Philby’s capacity for extreme and unprovoked rudeness. ‘Elizabeth and I were among the few English people to whom St John Philby was prepared to be civil.’ To Elliott’s surprise, the lunch was a social and diplomatic success. Humphrey Trevelyan, the British ambassador to Iraq, who was staying with the Elliotts, ‘drew the old man out into telling us the story of his relationship with Ibn Saud’. The Philbys, the Copelands and several other friends attended this ‘memorable occasion’, lubricated by a small river of Lebanese wine.

Elliott described the ensuing events: St John Philby ‘left at tea time, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of the embassy staff in a night club, had a heart attack, and died’. The last words of this brilliant and impossible man were: ‘God, I’m bored.’ He left behind a shelf of scholarly works, two families, a black-throated partridge named after him (Alectoris philbyi), and an enduring trail of notoriety.

The relationship between father and son, Elliott reflected, had been ‘a mixture of love and hate’. Philby admired and feared his father, whose domination, he felt, had caused his stammer. Back in the 1930s, he had spied on St John, while reporting to Soviet intelligence that his father was ‘not completely well in the head’. But they had grown closer in later life, particularly after Kim’s move to the Middle East. Philby told Elliott that his father had once advised him: ‘If you feel strongly enough about anything you must have the guts to go through with it no matter what anyone might think.’ Both Philbys had certainly done that. Kim later wrote that had his father lived to learn the truth about him, he would have been ‘thunderstruck, but by no means disapproving’. That verdict is questionable. The elder Philby was a contrarian, a rule-breaker and something of an intellectual thug, but he was no traitor. Even so, he had always supported his son, driven his ambition, and undoubtedly planted the seeds of his sedition.

Kim buried St John Philby with full Islamic rites under his Muslim name, and then disappeared into the bars of Beirut. Elliott noted that Philby ‘went out of circulation for days’. Eleanor was more specific: ‘He drank himself senseless’ and emerged from this ferocious drinking bout a changed man, frailer in both body and spirit. Philby’s mother Dora had always doted on him, while his relationship with St John was often tense; yet St John’s death affected him far more. ‘Kim seemed overwhelmed by his father’s death,’ wrote Richard Beeston. His moorings began to slip.

*

A few months earlier, the British intelligence community in Beirut had been enlivened by the arrival of a new and glamorous addition to their ranks. At thirty-eight, George Behar had lived several lives already. Born in Rotterdam in 1922, to a Dutch mother and Egyptian-Jewish father, as a teenager he had joined the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands, endured internment, and then fled to London disguised as a monk, where he joined MI6, trained as an interrogator in multiple languages, and changed his name to the more English-sounding George Blake. After the war he was posted to Korea to set up an MI6 intelligence network, but was captured by the advancing North Korean communist forces soon after his arrival, and held in captivity for three years. Finally emerging in 1953, Blake was welcomed back by MI6 as a returning hero and sent to Berlin as a case officer working under Elliott’s friend Peter Lunn, tasked with recruiting Soviet intelligence officers as double agents. With his Egyptian blood and gift for languages, Blake was considered ideal material for a Middle East posting, and in 1960 he was enrolled in the Middle Eastern Centre for Arabic Studies, the language school in the hills outside Beirut, run by the Foreign Office. The centre offered intensive, eighteen-month courses in Arabic for diplomats, international businessmen, graduates and intelligence officers. The Lebanese regarded it as a spy school. With his sterling war record and his experience as a prisoner in North Korea, Blake was a minor celebrity in intelligence circles, and when the handsome young MI6 officer arrived in Beirut with his two sons and a pregnant wife, he was eagerly embraced by Anglo-American spy society.

Elliott considered George Blake ‘a most promising officer’ and a credit to the service, ‘a good-looking fellow, tall and with excellent manners and universally popular’. He was stunned, therefore, to receive a message from London in April informing him that Blake was a Soviet spy, who must be tricked into returning to Britain where he would be interrogated, arrested and tried for treason.

Blake had been ‘turned’ during his North Korean captivity. In detention, he had read the works of Karl Marx and found what he thought was truth. But ‘it was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses’ that triggered his whole-hearted conversion to communism: ‘I felt I was on the wrong side.’ British snobbery and prejudice may have played a part in his embrace of revolution, for, as a foreign-born Jew, Blake was never fully admitted to the MI6 club. ‘He doesn’t belong in the service,’ sniffed one colleague. Blake considered himself a ‘man of no class’, but in the long intelligence tradition, he had wanted to marry his secretary, Iris Peake, the upper-crust daughter of an Old Etonian Conservative MP. The relationship ran aground on the immovable British class system. ‘He was in love with her, but could not possibly marry her because of his circumstances,’ wrote his wife Gillian, who was also in MI6 (along with her father and sister). She believed the break-up had sharpened his resentment of the British establishment. In Berlin, Blake contacted the KGB, under the guise of recruiting spies within the Soviet service, and began passing over reams of top secret and highly damaging information, including details of numerous covert operations such as the Berlin Tunnel, a plot to eavesdrop on the Soviets from underground. At night he copied out Peter Lunn’s index cards, listing and identifying every MI6 spy in Germany. Blake betrayed an estimated 400 agents, sending an untold number to their deaths. Soon after his arrival in Beirut, Blake established contact with Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin, the KGB head of station, who gave him a telephone number to call in case of an emergency – a moment which was, though neither knew it, imminent.

Early in 1961, a Polish spy with a large moustache and an extravagant ego defected in Berlin. Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Goleniewski had been deputy head of military counter-intelligence and chief of the technical and scientific section of the Polish Intelligence Service. In the 1950s, he passed Polish secrets to the Soviets. Then in 1959, he began anonymously passing Polish and Soviet secrets to the CIA, which passed them on to MI6. Goleniewski was a fantasist (he would later claim to be the Tsarevich Alexei of Russia), but some of his intelligence was first-rate, including the revelation that a Soviet spy codenamed ‘Lambda’ was operating within British intelligence. And he had proof: copies of three MI6 documents that this spy had handed to his Soviet handlers. MI6 worked out that only ten people, in Warsaw and Berlin, could have had access to all three pieces of paper: one of them was George Blake. By the spring of 1961, MI6 was ‘ninety per cent sure’ that Blake was ‘Lambda’. Dick White sent a cable to Elliott, instructing him that Blake should be lured ‘to London immediately, on the pretext of discussing a future posting’. For once, Elliott did not tell his friend Kim Philby what was going on. The trap for George Blake was baited and set for Saturday 25 March.

A direct summons to London would have alerted Blake to the danger. Instead, Elliott contrived a chance meeting. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Elliott’s secretary called on the Blakes and told them that she had a spare ticket to an amateur production of Charley’s Aunt. Blake’s wife was busy looking after a sick child, and the secretary wondered ‘whether Blake would like to accompany her’. Blake reluctantly agreed to take a break from his studies and spend a few hours watching British people performing this most English of plays. During the interval, Blake and the secretary repaired to the bar with the other thirsty ex-pats, and found Elliott and Elizabeth. ‘In the course of conversation, Elliott drew me aside and said he was glad I happened to be there as this had saved him a trip up the mountain to see me. He had received a letter from Head Office with instructions for me to return to London for a few days’ consultation in connection with a new appointment. It suggested that I should travel on Easter Monday so as to be available in London on Tuesday morning.’

The encounter was staged to allay suspicion: an unplanned meeting at a bar, not a directive; a leisurely letter, not an urgent telegram; a suggestion of when he might like to come to London, not an order. Yet Blake was alarmed. He was in the middle of his language course (for which MI6 was paying) and about to sit some important exams. He would be returning to London on holiday in July. What was the urgency? Blake called the emergency number Nedosekin had given him. They met later that evening on a beach near Beirut. Nedosekin said he would consult Moscow Centre: Blake held a valid Syrian visa, and if necessary he could be across the border in a few hours, and then whisked to Moscow. But when they met again the next day, Nedosekin was reassuring: ‘Moscow saw no cause for concern. The KGB’s enquiries had failed to reveal a leak: Blake should return to London, as requested.’

Before heading to England, Blake paid a last visit to Elliott, to say goodbye and collect some money for his airfare. Elliott was as jovial as ever, but as Blake was leaving, the MI6 station chief asked him whether he would like to be booked into St Ermin’s Hotel, on Caxton Street, just a few yards from MI6 headquarters, for the duration of his London visit. (St Ermin’s is the spy hotel: it was where Krivitsky was debriefed and Philby was recruited, bristling with intelligence officers, and probably the easiest place in London to keep tabs on a suspected traitor.) Blake politely declined, explaining that he planned to stay with his mother in Radlett, north of London. Elliott pressed the point, insisting it ‘would be more convenient to stay at the hotel’. Why was Elliott so insistent he should stay there, rather than with his mother in rural Hertfordshire? ‘For a moment a shadow of a doubt passed my mind but it passed away again,’ Blake wrote. Elliott was probably just being helpful.

Dick White had seen Philby slip through his fingers in 1951; a decade later, he was not going to make the same mistake with Blake. On arriving in London, Blake was escorted to the MI6 house in Carlton Gardens, ushered into an upstairs room (which was bugged), and told that ‘a few matters had cropped up about his time in Berlin that needed to be ironed out’. Elliott had told him he was coming back to discuss a future appointment; there had been no mention of the past. Blake now realised, with grim certainty, what was at hand: ‘I was in deep trouble.’ On the first day of interrogation, he stonewalled, as a trio of MI6 officers chipped away at his explanations; on the second, as the pressure mounted and he was shown evidence of his own espionage, he began to wobble. ‘It wasn’t hostile, but it was persistent.’ Blake was now in no doubt that MI6 knew he was guilty. On day three, one of the interrogators remarked, in a friendly manner, that Blake must have been tortured by the North Koreans into confessing he was a British intelligence officer, and then blackmailed into working as a communist spy. It was all perfectly understandable.

Then Blake snapped: ‘No, nobody tortured me! No, nobody blackmailed me! I myself approached the Soviets and offered my services to them of my own accord.’

Blake’s pride could simply not allow him to accept the suggestion that he was spying for anything other than the most lofty ideological motives. Perhaps the same tactic might have flushed out Philby a decade earlier; then again, Blake lacked Philby’s innate duality. ‘The game was up,’ he wrote. Over the ensuing days, his confession tumbled out, in a cathartic affirmation of his own guilt, delivered with some pride. But if Blake imagined that candour would win him clemency, he was mistaken. The British authorities hit him with ‘the biggest hammer possible’.

The Blake case was the worst spy scandal since the defection of Burgess and Maclean, and in terms of raw intelligence losses, far more damaging. Blake had exposed scores of agents, though he would always maintain, implausibly, that there was no blood on his hands. He was charged under the Official Secrets Act, remanded in custody at a closed hearing, and incarcerated in Brixton Prison to await trial. A telegram flew around the world, in two sections, to every MI6 station: the first part read: ‘The following name is a traitor’; the second, when decoded, spelled out the letters G-E-O-R-G-E-B-L-A-K-E.

The discovery of another spy in MI6 provoked a mixed reaction in the US. For some CIA veterans (including Bill Harvey, Philby’s first and most vehement accuser) it was yet more evidence of British incompetence and treachery, but James Angleton was reassuring, telling Dick White: ‘It can happen to anyone.’

The news of Blake’s arrest and impending trial caused consternation in Beirut’s intelligence community; no one was more genuinely shocked and alarmed than Kim Philby. In accordance with established intelligence rules, the KGB had maintained total separation between the Blake and Philby cases. The two spies had never met, and Blake had been recruited quite independently of the Cambridge network. But Blake’s capture suggested, rightly, that MI6 must have new sources within Soviet intelligence, and if one mole had been dug out, then Philby might well be next.

Less than a month after confessing, Blake was in the dock at the Old Bailey. The maximum penalty for violation of the Official Secrets Act was fourteen years. The prosecutors, however, brought five separate charges against him, relating to five distinct time periods. The verdict was never in doubt, but the sentence drew gasps from the court. ‘Your case is one of the worst that can be envisaged,’ the judge declared, and then handed down fourteen-year jail terms for each of the charges; he further ordered that three of the terms should run consecutively – a total of forty-two years’ imprisonment. The conviction was front-page news in every newspaper. It was the longest prison sentence ever handed down by a British court. Reporters suggested, fancifully, that Blake had been given a year for every agent he had betrayed and killed. By that arithmetic, he would have been sentenced to some four centuries behind bars.

The news of Blake’s harsh sentence left Philby stunned. He had spied for longer than Blake, at a far higher level, and at greater human cost. In the 1950s the government had quailed at the prospect of a public trial for espionage; now the authorities seemed prepared to prosecute, and ruthlessly. If Philby were to be caught, tried and convicted in the same way as Blake, he would never get out of prison. For perhaps the first time, Philby realised the full extent of the peril he was in.

The journalist Richard Beeston visited Philby a few days later, to see what he made of the Blake story.

I went round to his flat late in the morning to find it in chaos after a party with furniture overturned and bottles and glasses everywhere. Kim was looking terrible, nursing a hangover which made him even more incoherent. ‘Never met Blake, never even heard of the chap until I read of his arrest,’ Kim told me . . . Kim’s appearance had strikingly deteriorated since I had last seen him. And there is little doubt that Blake’s arrest and his savage forty-two-year prison sentence precipitated Kim’s further decline.

For decades, Philby had drunk heavily, but never uncontrollably; henceforth, he became volatile and unpredictable. As an evening progressed, ‘Kim would become insulting, abusive, make lunges at women and not infrequently goose the hostess.’ Even Eleanor, a prodigious boozer herself, noticed that her husband was ‘not light-hearted about drink any longer’. They argued publicly, and sometimes fought physically: one dinner party ended with the Philbys hurling mantelpiece ornaments at each other, while their appalled hosts looked on. Once a voluble drunk, he now drank himself incoherent, then silent, and finally unconscious. Parties ended with Philby slumped insensible on a sofa, or even under a blanket on the floor while the party continued around him. After sobering up, he would send a charming note of apology, and frequently flowers. ‘By the next day he was usually forgiven.’

Philby had always prided himself on maintaining his spycraft no matter how much alcohol he consumed. Now he began to make mistakes. A first rule of espionage is to avoid consistency of behaviour, but friends noticed that Philby was frequently absent on Wednesday nights. One teased him: ‘I know all about your Wednesday nights.’ Philby looked aghast. Wednesday was his night for meeting Petukhov. He dropped remarks, suggestive of a man in fear. One night at Joe’s bar, Moyra Beeston asked Philby, half in jest, if he really was the ‘Third Man’. Instead of denying it, or even replying directly, he seized her by the wrist so hard he left a bruise. ‘You know Moyra, I always believe that loyalty to your friends is more important than anything else’ – a self-revealing remark for a man who had repeatedly betrayed his own friends, in obedience to what he claimed was a higher loyalty. ‘What would you do if you knew something awful was going to happen to a friend and only you could do something about it?’ he asked her. He was plainly referring to his own decision to tip off Maclean so many years earlier, but also to his current predicament, as he awaited ‘something awful’.

In late August 1962, Kim and Eleanor headed to Jordan for a long-planned family holiday. A few days before they were due to come home, Philby announced that he had to return to Beirut at once, offering no explanation for his sudden departure. When Eleanor got back to the flat, she found the lights off, and Philby sitting in the dark on the terrace, sodden with drink and inconsolable with grief.

‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’

‘Jackie’s dead,’ said Philby.

The pet fox had fallen from the balcony, dropping five floors to the street below. Eleanor suspected that the Lebanese maid, who had long disapproved of keeping a smelly wild animal in a city flat, had pushed the fox over the parapet.

‘Kim seemed to give himself up to grief,’ wrote Eleanor, who thought his mourning for the pet, while understandable, ‘seemed out of all proportion’. Nicholas Elliott, too, was surprised and worried that Philby seemed ‘shattered’ by the death of the fox, anguished and tearful: ‘Apart from when his father died, this was the only occasion, in all the times I spent with Philby, that I knew him to display visible emotion.’ Philby was cracking up, partly through grief, and partly through fear.

*

In Helsinki some seven months earlier, a short, stout Russian wrapped in a fur coat had knocked on the door of Frank Freiberg, the CIA representative in Finland, and announced, in very bad English, that he wanted to defect to the West. Major Anatoly Golitsyn of the KGB had been planning his move for some time. As a senior officer in the KGB’s strategic planning department and a fifteen-year veteran of Soviet intelligence, he had accumulated a vast trove of secrets, most of them memorised, or half-memorised, or almost-remembered. For the problem with Golitsyn was that while he knew a great deal about some aspects of Soviet intelligence, he also knew a little about a lot. Much of the information he carried, in his head and in the package of documents he had hidden in the snow before knocking on Freiberg’s door, was reliable and accurate; but much was fragmentary, and some was wrong. Golitsyn was whisked to the US, to begin a debriefing process that would continue for many years.

James Angleton was delighted, insisting that Golitsyn was ‘the most valuable defector ever to reach the West’. Others considered him unreliable. Some thought he was a fruitcake. In the spring of 1962, the CIA allowed Golitsyn to travel to London to be interviewed by British intelligence. There Golitsyn described how, in Moscow, he had heard tell of a ‘very important spy network in the United Kingdom called the Ring of Five’, a quintet of British spies who had met at university and over many years had furnished Soviet intelligence with the most valuable information. Although Golitsyn could not identify Philby by name, or even codename, that information alone was enough to revive the long-dormant investigation, and put MI5’s mole-hunters firmly back on Philby’s trail.

The defection sent shockwaves through the KGB. Some fifty-four KGB stations around the world were instructed to report whatever Golitsyn might know about their operations. Meetings with important KGB agents were suspended, and plans were approved for the assassination, at the earliest opportunity, of Anatoly Golitsyn.

Yuri Modin had left Britain in 1958. But in the summer of 1962, according to CIA records, he travelled to the Middle East, via Pakistan. Not until much later did MI5 investigators work out that Modin’s trip coincided with the moment that Philby had suddenly returned early from the family holiday in Jordan, from which point on he had ‘exhibited increasing signs of alcoholism and stress’. MI5 concluded that ‘Modin had gone to Beirut to alert Philby’, and tell him that another, well-informed, defector was spilling secrets. If Modin made contact with Philby in Beirut, the location has never been revealed. He later described the once-irrepressible Agent Stanley as ‘a shadow of his former self’. The purpose of his visit was clear: ‘To warn Philby not to return to Britain because of the danger of arrest, and to make contingency plans for his escape.’ The warning, however, seems to have sent Philby into a tailspin of fear. When Eleanor found Philby sitting in the dark, his tears were not only for his dead fox.

In October 1962, Nicholas Elliott was offered a new post, as the MI6 director for Africa, based in London. It was another major promotion, covering another important Cold War arena. His two years in the Lebanon had been fascinating, fruitful and fun, with plenty of the ‘belly laughs’ for which Elliott lived. He would be leaving Beirut with regrets, not least over Philby’s deteriorated state. Peter Lunn, his predecessor in Vienna, would replace him as MI6 station chief. Before heading to Beirut to take over from Elliott, Lunn asked Dick White what, if anything, he should do about Kim Philby. White was aware that Philby was back in MI5’s sights. ‘Of course he’s a traitor,’ he snapped. ‘Just keep an eye on him. Let’s wait and see what happens.’

Philby was also waiting, with dread. Bereaved, under threat of exposure, alarmed by the shocking example made of Blake, and now deprived of the companionship and immediate support of the one person who had always defended him, Philby sank ever deeper into the whisky bottle.

The denouement came not by way of new information from a fresh defector, as Philby feared, but through an old friend, recalling a thirty-year-old conversation he had long forgotten.

See Notes on Chapter 16