A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

17

I Thought it Would Be You

Flora Solomon had lived a life that stretched, rather bizarrely, from the Russian Revolution to the British High Street: after an early affair with a Bolshevik revolutionary and marriage to a British soldier, she had been widowed young, raised her son Peter alone (who by 1961 had founded Amnesty International) and then created the welfare department at Marks and Spencer. A pillar of Anglo-Jewish society, she continued to hold regular salons in her Mayfair home, just as she had in the 1930s. Solomon remained Russian in accent, British in manner, and a committed Zionist in her politics. ‘Russian soul, Jewish heart, British passport’ was how she described herself. By 1962, her main passion in life was the state of Israel, which she defended and supported, in word, deed and funds, at every opportunity.

It was Flora Solomon’s commitment to Israel that brought Kim Philby back into her life. Every week, she read the Observer, paying particular attention to coverage of the Middle East, and found herself becoming increasingly irritated by Philby’s articles. ‘To anyone with eyes to see they were permeated with anti-Israel bias. They accepted the Soviet view of Middle East politics,’ she wrote. In the simplistic divisions imposed by the Cold War, while Israel was supported by Washington, Moscow curried favour among the Arab states, and in Solomon’s subjective opinion, Philby was churning out Soviet propaganda designed to weaken her beloved Israel. (This was not actually true: Philby was instinctively pro-Arab, but he was far too canny to reveal any overt pro-Soviet bias in his journalism.) During the 1950s she had assumed that the accusations against Philby were merely McCarthyite smears. Now she was not so sure. She remembered his remarks about ‘the cause’ back in 1935, and the rather clumsy attempt to recruit her. ‘The thought occurred to me that Philby had, after all, remained a communist, notwithstanding his clearance by MI5 of possible complicity in the Burgess-Maclean scandal.’

In August 1962, Flora Solomon visited Israel, as she had done many times before, to attend a conference at the Chaim Weizmann Institute, the science research centre in Rehovot founded by Israel’s first President and endowed by Baron Sieff, the chairman of Marks and Spencer. At a party in Weizmann’s home, she encountered Victor, Lord Rothschild, another patron of the institute. A distinguished scientist himself, Rothschild had headed MI5’s sabotage and explosives section during the war and won the George Medal for ‘dangerous work in hazardous circumstances’. A regular at the Harris soirées and a Cambridge contemporary of Burgess and Blunt, Rothschild would later be accused, quite unfairly, of being a Soviet spy himself. In fact, though a left-winger in his youth, like Flora Solomon he had no truck with communism, and retained close links with MI5. Rothschild and Solomon had known each other since the 1930s, and their conversation naturally drifted towards their mutual acquaintance, Kim Philby.

‘How is it the Observer uses a man like Kim? Don’t they know he’s a communist?’ observed Solomon.

Rothschild was startled by the certainty in her voice. Solomon went on to describe how, back in 1935, Philby had told her, with pride, that he was doing a ‘very dangerous job for peace’, and attempted to enlist her as a communist spy. Rothschild was now listening intently. He had followed the Philby case closely, and knew that despite an array of circumstantial evidence against a man who had once been his friend, no one had come forward to link Philby directly with Soviet intelligence. He began to quiz her about Philby and the wartime circle of friends they had shared. She replied that she had always suspected that Tommy Harris might be a Soviet spy, based on an ‘intuitive feeling that Harris was more than just a friend’ to Kim Philby.

Flora Solomon later maintained that her motives in exposing Philby were strictly political: he was writing anti-Israeli articles, and she wanted him sacked from the Observer. But her reasons were also personal. Solomon had introduced Philby to Aileen back in 1939, and felt partly responsible for the saga that ensued, ending in Aileen’s sad and lonely death. Solomon had tried to put the tragedy out of her mind, but she remained furious with Philby for ‘the terrible way he treated his women’. The ghost of Aileen Furse was about to exact revenge.

‘You must do something,’ Flora Solomon told Rothschild, in her imperious way.

‘I will think about it,’ he told her.

Victor Rothschild was a veteran string-puller. He did more than think. On his return to London, he immediately reported the conversation to MI5, sparking jubilation among the small group of officers still determined to bring Philby to justice. Here, at last, was a ‘major breakthrough’. With difficulty, Flora Solomon was persuaded to come to an interview with MI5 officers in Rothschild’s flat, which was bugged for the occasion. There she repeated her account of the conversation with Philby from three decades earlier. The investigators found her ‘a strange, rather untrustworthy woman’, and suspected she had been more deeply implicated in left-wing radicalism than she was admitting. The interview was recorded by MI5 investigator Peter Wright. Writing many years later in his explosive book Spycatcher, Wright wondered if she and Philby had been lovers, and whether her belated revelation was motivated by spite: ‘She clearly had a grudge against him.’

Flora Solomon was now getting cold feet, alarmed that if she testified against Philby she might invite the attentions of a KGB assassination squad. ‘I will never give public evidence,’ she told MI5. ‘There is too much risk.’ The more MI5 pressed her to make a formal legal statement, the more anxious she became: ‘It will leak, I know it will leak, and then what will my family do?’ She did, however, agree to speak to officers from Mossad, although offended by the implication that she would be more forthcoming with Israeli intelligence officials than British ones.

Solomon’s revelation finally provided evidence that Philby had been an active Soviet spy, a recruiter for the communist cause who had deliberately covered up his past and lied repeatedly under interrogation. It was the ammunition that Buster Milmo had lacked, and the evidence of guilt that Philby’s supporters had always demanded. ‘Why didn’t she tell us ten years ago?’ said White, when told of Solomon’s revelation. She had a ready answer for that question: ‘I had not volunteered information as every public statement had pointed to his innocence.’ The fault was not hers, she insisted, but theirs: Philby’s escape from justice was proof of ‘how clubmanship and the old school tie could protect their own’.

That protection was now at an end; MI5 prepared to strike. The officer who had worked on the Philby case since 1951, Arthur Martin, would administer the coup de grâce. For more than a decade, Martin had tried to pierce Philby’s armour. No one knew the case better. With Solomon’s evidence, and the corroborative testimony from Golitsyn, the other elements of suspicion slotted into place. An intense debate now began over how to bring Philby to account, a task that still presented major problems, politically, legally and practically. Even if Solomon could somehow be persuaded to testify, her evidence was hearsay. George Blake had been convicted by his own testimony, but Philby would probably deny everything, as he always had, and without a confession there was no guarantee of a conviction. Any trial would be embarrassing, particularly if it emerged that Philby was still in the pay of MI6; but a trial that failed to secure a conviction would be disastrous. For Harold Macmillan, now Prime Minister, the issue was particularly sensitive: as Foreign Secretary, he had personally cleared Philby; another espionage trial could bring down the Conservative government. Philby might be tricked into returning to England, perhaps by a summons from his editors, and then forced into a confession. But Philby knew very well how Blake had been trapped, and was adjudged ‘far too wily’ to fall for the same ruse; a summons to London would merely alert him. There were even more radical alternatives: Philby could be abducted from Beirut, or even killed. But given the rising Cold War tension, the murder or kidnapping of a Soviet spy might set off an ugly retaliation, with untold consequences. Besides, since the Crabb affair there had been little appetite for dramatic adventures. Only Philby knew the full extent of his own espionage; alive, he might be persuaded to reveal other Soviet spies lurking inside the British establishment.

‘We need to discover what damage he caused,’ Dick White told Macmillan. ‘A full damage report with all the details of how the Russians had operated and who else was working with Philby is of great importance.’ Besides, though he might be a traitor, Philby ‘should be treated as a gentleman’. White sketched out a plan of action that would cause least embarrassment, while yielding maximum benefit: Arthur Martin should fly to Beirut as soon as possible, present Philby with the conclusive evidence against him, and then offer him a way out: immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession and complete cooperation. No such deal had been offered to George Blake; but then Blake, a foreigner, was not a gentleman. Macmillan agreed to the plan, but insisted on total secrecy: ‘Keep a lid on things,’ he instructed Dick White. The Attorney-General and the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office also approved the plan, though they were careful to commit nothing to paper. MI5 compiled a ‘voluminous brief in preparation for the confrontation’, which Martin studied as he prepared for the showdown in Beirut: he would break Philby, extract the truth, and destroy him once and for all. The only obstacle to this happy scenario was Nicholas Elliott.

Within days of his return to London, Elliott was summoned to see Dick White, and told, with some relish, that there could no longer be any doubt: Flora Solomon’s evidence confirmed that Philby had been a Soviet spy since the early 1930s. He had betrayed his country, his class and his club; he had lied to MI5 and MI6, the CIA and FBI, to his family, friends and colleagues; he had deceived everyone, egregiously, brilliantly, for more than thirty years. But no one had been betrayed more comprehensively than Nicholas Elliott.

Elliott had been just twenty-four, grieving over the death of Basil Fisher, when he was befriended and beguiled by Philby, a man he had then trusted, revered and supported throughout his adult life. Their lives had seemed to run in tandem, through public school, Cambridge and MI6, overlapping professionally, culturally and geographically. From St Albans to Istanbul, Elliott had modelled himself on Philby: his spycraft, his air of worldly irony, his umbrella with the ebony handle. They seldom discussed their fears, or hopes, for theirs was a most English friendship, founded on cricket, alcohol and jokes, based on a shared set of assumptions about the world, and their privileged place in it. They were as close as two heterosexual, upper-class, mid-century Englishmen could be. Elliott’s loyalty was of the military type, an unquestioning readiness to stand by a comrade under fire: he had valued this friendship forged in wartime above all else. Now, for the first time, he began to count its cost, to wonder how many people he, James Angleton and others had unwittingly condemned to death. Some of the victims had names: the German anti-communist Catholics identified by the Vermehrens; the Volkovs in Istanbul; the young Georgians slipped across the Turkish border to their deaths; perhaps even Buster Crabb’s strange death could be attributed to Philby. Many casualties remain nameless: the multiple agents infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain, and never seen again; the Albanian ‘pixies’, captured and killed in their hundreds, along with their families; the unknown number of agents exposed in the Middle East. Elliott would never be able to calculate the precise death tally, for who can remember every conversation, every confidence exchanged with a friend stretching back three decades? The weekends at the cricket, the evenings at the club, the nights on the town in Beirut: it had all been a charade, the simulacrum of comradeship, while Philby gathered information for his Soviet masters. Elliott had given away almost every secret he had to Philby; but Philby had never given away his own.

Elliott’s emotions on discovering Philby’s betrayal can only be surmised, for he preferred not to discuss them. His upper lip remained ramrod stiff. He came from a generation of Englishmen who believed that feelings are a sign of weakness, to be suppressed, ignored or laughed off. A different sort of man might have buckled under the pain, but Elliott was tough, and a dissembler in his own way, for British breeding and schooling produce a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty. As John le Carré once wrote, the privately educated Englishman ‘is the greatest dissembler on earth . . . Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool . . . He can have a Force Twelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue and you may be his best friend but you’ll never be the wiser.’ Elliott had survived a brutal prep school, the chilliness of his father, the death of his first friend, by pretending that everything was perfectly all right. And he survived Philby’s intimate betrayal in exactly the same way. But those who knew him best saw that beneath the ever-languid manner, the armoury of jokes and the insouciant air, from the moment he finally understood and accepted Philby’s treachery, Elliott’s world changed utterly: inside, he was crushed, humiliated, enraged and saddened. For the rest of his life, he would never cease to wonder how a man to whom he had felt so close, and so similar in every way, had been, underneath, a fraud. Once, he would have died for Philby; now, as he told his son, he would ‘happily have killed him’. Philby had made a first-class fool of him and a mockery of their lifelong friendship; he had broken every canon of clubmanship and fraternity, and caused incalculable damage to the service, and the country, that Elliott loved. Elliott needed to know why. He wanted to look Philby in the eye one last time. He wanted to understand.

Elliott demanded to be allowed to confront Philby himself. He had known him more than half his life, and if anyone could extract a confession from the man, it was surely he. The idea appealed to Dick White. Elliott’s righteous anger might lend him additional moral weight, and ‘there was more chance that Philby could be persuaded to confess by an outraged sympathiser than by a stiff, lower-middle-class MI5 officer’. White calculated that since Elliott had been ‘Philby’s greatest supporter in 1951, his anger at having been betrayed would suggest that we had more proof than he realised’. In the past, White had been nettled by Elliott’s support for Philby, but he considered him ‘a proficient, clever and determined officer who would stop at nothing if the interests of the Crown required’. It was agreed: Elliott would fly out to Beirut, and nail Philby. The CIA was not informed about the proof of Philby’s guilt, or the decision to have Elliott confront him. The Americans could be informed once the case had been resolved. If James Angleton found out what was going on, he would certainly demand some involvement. The decision was made to keep him in the dark. Some wondered whether Elliott would be able to restrain his anger if he was allowed in the same room as the friend who had cheated him so thoroughly, but ‘Elliott swore not to exceed his brief, coldly angry though he now was’.

Peter Wright described the reaction inside MI5 to the news that MI6 was sending not the dogged Arthur Martin to confront Philby, but one of their own tribe.

The few of us inside MI5 privy to this decision were appalled. It was not simply a matter of chauvinism, though, not unnaturally, that played a part. We in MI5 had never doubted Philby’s guilt from the beginning, and now at last we had the evidence needed to corner him. Philby’s friends in MI6, Elliott chief among them, had continually protested his innocence. Now, when the proof was inescapable, they wanted to keep it in-house. The choice of Elliott rankled strongly.

To strengthen Elliott’s hand, Dick White told him that new evidence had been obtained from the defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, although exactly what he revealed remains a matter of conjecture, and some mystery. Golitsyn had not specifically identified Philby as ‘Agent Stanley’, but White gave Elliott the impression that he had. Was this intentional sleight of hand by White, allowing Elliott to believe that the evidence against Philby was stronger than it really was? Or did Elliott interpret as hard fact something that had only been implied? Either way, he prepared for his trip to Beirut in the certainty that Philby was bang to rights: ‘We’d fully penetrated the KGB, so we had confirmation.’ Elliott’s instructions were verbal, and only two men knew what they were: Dick White, and Nicholas Elliott himself.

In Beirut, Eleanor Philby watched in despair as her once-charming husband fell apart in a miasma of drink and depression. Philby was ‘vertically intoxicated, horizontally intoxicated’, and often intoxicated in solitude. ‘It was as if our flat was the only place he felt safe.’ When he did venture out for social events, he invariably ended up insensible. To her deep embarrassment he had to be bodily carried out of an embassy party. ‘He only had to smell a drink to set him off. His depression never seemed to lift,’ wrote Eleanor, who ‘groped to understand his tension and remoteness’. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked him repeatedly. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Oh nothing, nothing,’ he would reply.

Looking back, she realised that Philby’s desperate drinking, his search for alcoholic oblivion, was the mark of a man living in dread.

Philby’s journalism dried to a trickle. Peter Lunn noticed that Philby’s hands shook when they met for the first time. Philby insisted that if they should ever encounter each other at a social event, they should pretend to be strangers – a precaution that Lunn considered bizarre and unnecessary. After Elliott’s warmth, Eleanor found Lunn a ‘very cold fish indeed’.

On New Year’s Eve, Philby refused to go to any of the numerous Beirut parties on offer, and instead sat drinking champagne with Eleanor on the balcony of the flat, in gloomy silence. The next day was his fifty-first birthday, and Eleanor had planned a small midday drinks party. By 2.30, the guests had left. The Philbys intended to spend the day quietly at home, but then Miles Copeland appeared: ‘He dragged us protesting to an all-day New Year party given by some Americans.’ Philby had ‘already had a good deal to drink’, and became steadily drunker. As night fell, they staggered home to the Rue Kantari. Eleanor was preparing for bed, when she heard a loud crash from the bathroom, a cry of pain, and then another crash. Philby had fallen over, smashed his head on the radiator, lurched to his feet, and fallen again. ‘He was bleeding profusely from two great gashes on the crown of his head. The whole bathroom was spattered with blood.’ Eleanor wrapped his head in a towel, and rushed frantically to the telephone. Philby, dazed and still drunk, refused to leave the flat. Finally, a Lebanese doctor arrived and declared: ‘If we don’t get your husband to the hospital I will not be responsible for his life.’ Philby was coaxed into the lift and driven to the American University hospital, where he was stitched up and sedated. A doctor took Eleanor aside and told her gravely that with ‘one more ounce of alcohol in his blood, he would have been dead’.

Philby insisted on returning home that night. He cut a pathetic figure, in a blood-stained dressing gown, with two livid black eyes and a turban of bandages around his head. ‘I was a bloody fool,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going on the wagon – forever.’

A week later, Nick Elliott broke the journey to Beirut in Athens, where he met Halsey Colchester, the MI6 station chief, and his wife Rozanne, valued friends from Istanbul days. Elliott had already ‘prepared himself for a battle of wits he was determined to win’, but he needed to unburden himself before heading on to Beirut. ‘I’ve got an awful task,’ he told Halsey and Rozanne. ‘I’ve got to beard him.’ Like Elliott, the Colchesters had long admired and defended Philby, and they were stunned by the proof of his guilt. ‘It was a terrible shock to hear he was this awful spy. He was always so nice, so affable and intelligent.’

Rozanne had known Elliott as a carefree spirit – ‘he always laughed about things’ – but over dinner in Athens, he was deadly serious, anxious and anguished. Rozanne’s account of that night is a picture of a man facing the worst moment of his life.

Nicholas knew he had blood on his hands. He knew Philby so well, and he was horrified by the whole thing. He said he wouldn’t mind shooting him. He didn’t know what he was going to say, and I remember him coaching himself: ‘There’s no pretending now. We know who you are.’ Nick was usually a very funny man. Like an actor or entertainer, you never felt he was quite real. One never really felt one knew him. Nicholas had that English way of not getting too involved, a sort of façade with endless jokes. But that night he was very highly strung. He was dreading it, and it was quite dangerous. He thought he might have been shot by Philby, or the Soviets. ‘I hope he doesn’t take a pot shot,’ he said. He talked obsessively about Philby, about how he had known him so well. He didn’t have to go through the ordeal, but he wanted to. It was really quite brave. He wanted to make sure for himself.

Elliott arrived in Beirut on 10 January 1963, and checked into a small, discreet hotel, far from the usual haunts of the spies and journalists. Only Peter Lunn knew he was in the city. Together they prepared the ground for the confrontation. Lunn’s secretary had an apartment in the Christian quarter, near the sea. The sitting room was carefully bugged by an MI6 technician with a hidden microphone under the sofa, and a wire running to a tape-recorder in the next-door room. Elliott bought a bottle of brandy. When everything was ready, Lunn telephoned Philby and ‘in a casual voice’ suggested ‘a meeting between himself and Philby to discuss future plans’. He gave no hint that anything was amiss. Since Philby had himself stressed the need for security, Lunn suggested meeting over tea at his secretary’s flat, where they could chat in private. Philby had barely left the Rue Kantari since his drunken fall on New Year’s Day, but he agreed to meet Lunn at the appointed address the following afternoon. He later told Eleanor: ‘The minute that call came through, I knew the balloon was up.’

At four o’clock on 12 January, Philby, his head still swathed in bandages, and a little unsteady on his feet, climbed the stairs and knocked on the apartment door.

When it was opened by Nicholas Elliott, Philby seemed strangely unsurprised. ‘I rather thought it would be you,’ he said.

See Notes on Chapter 17