A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

19

The Fade

Philby and Petukhov met a few hours later in Vrej, the backstreet Armenian restaurant. It took Philby only a few rushed minutes to explain the situation: MI6 had new and damning information, from Golitsyn, and had offered him immunity in exchange for information. He did not tell his KGB handler that he had already confessed; instead, he allowed Petukhov to believe that he was holding out under questioning (as he had so often before) but would soon face another round of interrogation. Petukhov hurried back to the Soviet embassy and sent a cable to Vassili Dozhdalev, the head of the British desk at Moscow Centre, requesting instructions. Dozhdalev asked whether Philby could withstand another cross-examination. ‘Philby does not think he can escape again,’ Petukhov told him. Dozhdalev gave the order: Philby should be extracted from Beirut as soon as possible.

‘Your time has come,’ Petukhov told Philby, at another hurriedly arranged meeting. ‘They won’t leave you alone now. You have to disappear. There’s no other way. There’s room for you in Moscow.’ This was probably what Philby had hoped to hear, though he had not yet fully made up his mind to flee. Elliott’s words, he later hinted, ‘had planted doubts in me and made me think about arguments he had used.’ He had mentally rehearsed the drama of defection many times, but still he hesitated.

‘Arrangements will take some time,’ said Petukhov. But when the time came, Philby would have to move swiftly. As before, Petukhov would walk past the Rue Kantari flat at pre-arranged times: ‘If you see me carrying a newspaper, that means I have to meet you. If I’m carrying a book, that means everything is prepared for your departure, and you have to get moving.’

Philby waited. A few days later, Peter Lunn called the apartment to ask if he was ready to discuss ‘the question that interests us’. Philby said he needed more time. Lunn did not put him under pressure; he did not offer to come to the flat and help to jog Philby’s memory. Instead, he announced he was going skiing. Philby learned from a friend at the embassy that a fresh fall of snow in the mountains had created ideal conditions and Lunn, the Olympic skier, would be gone for the next four days. That, at least, is what Philby was told. But Lunn did not go skiing.

On 23 January 1963, Glen Balfour-Paul, the first secretary at the British embassy, and his wife Marnie threw a dinner party. Several journalists were invited, including Clare Hollingworth of the Guardian and Kim Philby of the Observer. Philby had ‘proved a helpful and friendly contact’ since Balfour-Paul’s arrival in Beirut two years earlier, and the couples had grown close. Eleanor Philby was looking forward to dinner; for the first time in weeks, Philby had agreed to leave the flat for a social occasion. Glen Balfour-Paul was an expert Arabist, and Eleanor wanted to pick his brains about Middle Eastern archaeology, her new hobby. Marnie’s cook was making sherry trifle.

Philby spent the morning drinking coffee on the balcony, despite the lashing rain. Beirut was braced for one of the winter storms that batter the city with unpredictable ferocity. A figure carrying a book walked slowly past in the wet street without looking up. In the late afternoon, Philby grabbed his raincoat and scarf, and announced he was going to meet a contact but would be home by six, leaving plenty of time to dress for dinner. He was seen at the bar of the St Georges Hotel, apparently deep in thought. After downing several drinks, Philby asked the barman if he could use the telephone. Eleanor was cooking supper for her daughter Annie and Philby’s youngest son Harry, who were staying for the holiday, when the telephone rang. Thirteen-year-old Harry answered it, and shouted to Eleanor in the kitchen: ‘Daddy’s going to be late. He says he’ll meet you at the Balfour-Pauls’ at eight.’

Eight o’clock came and went at the Balfour-Pauls’ with no sign of Kim Philby. Eleanor apologised for her husband’s tardiness, and said she thought he might be sending a story to the Economist. By 9.30 what had been a ‘cosy gathering’ was becoming fractious and hungry. Marnie announced that they should eat anyway. The storm outside was building. When the food was cleared away, fresh drinks were served, and Eleanor, now quite drunk, was becoming worried. ‘God, what a horrible night! Perhaps he’s been hit by a car, or stumbled into the sea.’

Marnie tried to reassure her: ‘Don’t be silly, Kim’s obviously been held up.’ Clare Hollingworth noticed that her host, the diplomat Glen Balfour-Paul, ‘had nothing to say about his missing guest’, which struck her as strange.

While the Balfour-Pauls’ guests were eating trifle, a car with diplomatic plates drove towards the harbour in the sheeting rain. In the back sat Philby, with Pavel Nedosekin alongside him; Petukhov sat in front beside the driver. ‘Everything is fine, everything is going the way it should,’ said Nedosekin. Philby wondered, with a flicker of malice, just how much trouble Peter Lunn would get into for his ill-timed skiing break. At that moment a Latvian sailor was getting hopelessly drunk, with the generous encouragement of a Soviet intelligence officer, in one of the harbour bars. The car entered the port, drove along the quay and pulled up alongside the Dolmatova, a Soviet freighter taking on cargo and bound for Odessa. The Russian captain shook hands with Philby on the gangplank, and led him to a cabin. A bottle of cognac stood on the table. Philby, his minders and the captain raised their glasses and drank. In a few minutes the bottle was empty. Petukhov handed him an identity card in the name of ‘Villi Maris’, a merchant seaman from Riga. New clothes were laid out on the bed, including warm underwear. It would be cold in Moscow.

Eleanor left the Balfour-Pauls’ dinner party before midnight, and returned home through the rain. There was no sign of her husband at the Rue Kantari, and no message. She was now seriously alarmed. Soon after midnight, she telephoned Peter Lunn at home. Lunn’s wife Antoinette picked up, and explained that Peter was out. She agreed to pass on a message that he should contact Eleanor as soon as possible. In fact, Lunn was already at the British embassy, attending ‘a hastily summoned meeting about Kim’. The speed with which Lunn swung into action that night suggests that he was primed and waiting: perhaps the news of Philby’s failure to appear for dinner reached him from Balfour-Paul, but it is also possible that he was tracking Philby’s movements by other means. Within minutes, Lunn was on the telephone to Eleanor.

‘Would you like me to come round?’ he asked.

‘I would be most grateful,’ she said.

When Lunn duly appeared, Eleanor explained that Philby had left the flat earlier that afternoon, telephoned in the afternoon, and then vanished. Lunn asked if anything was missing, such as clothes, documents or Philby’s typewriter, but all was in place, including his British passport. Lunn surely knew that Philby was doing a ‘fade’, and already on his way to Moscow. The most important Soviet spy in history was on the run. But instead of behaving as one might expect in such a crisis, Lunn was calm; he did not conduct a full search of the flat, alert the Lebanese police, or put a watch on the borders, the ports or the airports. Fearing her husband had suffered some sort of accident, Eleanor wanted to call the hospitals, or search some of his favourite bars, but Lunn was almost nonchalant: ‘His advice was to do nothing until morning.’ Lunn left the flat at around 2 a.m., and immediately telephoned the British ambassador. Then he wrote a twenty-six-paragraph cable to Dick White in London.

Eleanor spent a sleepless night, waiting and wondering, struggling with the ‘terrible fear’ that her life had changed for ever. Before dawn, the Dolmatova weighed anchor and headed out to sea. The Russian freighter had obviously departed in haste, because some of her cargo was left lying on the quayside. She also left behind a member of her crew, a very drunk Latvian seaman called Villi Maris who would discover, when he finally woke up, that he had lost both his identity card and his ship. Philby stood at the rail of the Dolmatova, wrapped up against the cold in his Westminster scarf, and watched the dawn break over the receding bay, knowing that the ‘last link with England had been severed forever’.

*

Three years after independence, Congo was in turmoil, a Cold War battleground riven by civil war. It was certainly a logical place for Elliott to be. He always claimed he was in Brazzaville, preparing to cross the Congo River, when he received a coded message informing him of Philby’s disappearance, and instructing him to return at once to Beirut. But the speed with which he reappeared in Beirut suggests he may have been somewhere nearer at hand. Elliott concluded at once that ‘Philby had vanished into the blue (or rather the red)’. He found Eleanor close to hysteria, fearing that her husband had been abducted, or worse. Within days, she received a mysterious letter, purporting to come from Philby (several more would follow), hinting that he was on a secret journalistic assignment: ‘Tell my colleagues I’m on a long tour of the area.’ The letter was so peculiar in tone that Eleanor thought it might have been written under duress. Among Beirut’s journalists, it was generally assumed that if Philby was not chasing a story, he must be off on a bender, or bedded down somewhere with a mistress. MI6 knew better. The hasty departure of the Dolmatova clearly indicated where Philby had gone, and how. The Russian link was confirmed by the discovery of banknotes in Philby’s safe with serial numbers matching those recently issued to a Soviet diplomat by a Beirut bank.

Elliott did his best to calm Eleanor, without giving away what he knew. ‘There is no question that she was deeply in love with him and had no suspicion that he was a traitor to his country,’ Elliott wrote. Philby had disappeared ‘in circumstances calculated to do her maximum hurt’, but Elliott could not yet bring himself to reveal to Eleanor that Philby was a Soviet spy who had lied to her throughout their marriage, just as he had lied to Aileen throughout his previous marriage, and to Elliott himself throughout their friendship. Yet he hinted at the truth: ‘You do realise that your husband was not an ordinary man?’ he told her. She would find out just how extraordinary soon enough.

A few weeks later, a scruffy stranger knocked on the door of the apartment in the Rue Kantari, thrust an envelope into Eleanor’s hand, and disappeared back down the stairwell. The envelope contained a three-page typewritten letter, signed ‘with love from Kim’, instructing her to buy a plane ticket for London to throw any watchers off the scent, and then secretly go to the Czech airlines office and buy another ticket for Prague. Then she should go to the alleyway opposite the house, leading to the sea, ‘choose a spot high up on the wall, towards the right’ and write, in white chalk, the exact date and time of the flight to Prague. Philby instructed her to burn the letter after reading. Eleanor was deeply suspicious, and distraught, ‘convinced that Kim had been kidnapped’, and that she was being lured into a trap. In fact, Philby’s plan to get Eleanor to join him was genuine, if unworkable: the press had by now picked up the story of his mysterious disappearance, her movements were being watched, and the idea that Eleanor could blithely walk onto a plane and fly to Czechoslovakia was ludicrously impractical. After some indecision, she told Elliott about the letter, who instructed her ‘on no account to meet any strangers outside the house’. Elliott then crept up the alleyway and chalked a date and flight time on the wall, ‘to test the system and cause confusion in the enemy ranks’. It was the first thrust in a peculiar duel across the Iron Curtain.

The news of Philby’s defection tore like brushfire through the intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic, provoking shock, embarrassment and furious recrimination. Philby’s defenders in MI6 were stunned, and his detractors in MI5 enraged that he had been allowed to escape. In the CIA there was baffled dismay at what was seen as yet another British intelligence disaster. Hoover was livid. ‘Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard,’ wrote one MI5 officer. ‘To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed away, and the dark ages began.’ Arthur Martin, the officer originally slated to confront Philby in Beirut, was apoplectic: ‘We should have sent a team out there and grilled him while we had the chance.’ The belief that Philby must have been tipped off by another Soviet spy within British intelligence took root within MI5, prompting a mole-hunt that would continue for years, sowing paranoia and distrust into every corner of the organisation. Even Elliott came under investigation. Arthur Martin was detailed to grill him: ‘But after lengthy interrogation Elliott just convinced his interrogator that he was in the clear.’

Desmond Bristow, Philby’s protégé back in St Albans who had risen steadily through MI6 ranks, was stunned by the news: ‘He had been my boss and in many ways my teacher on the ways of espionage. I could not bring myself to think of him as a Soviet agent. Philby’s defection turned into a perennial cloud of doubt hanging over the present, the past, and the future.’ Dick White was said to have reacted with ‘horror’ to the news. ‘I never thought he would accept the offer of immunity and then skip the country,’ he said. To Elliott he confided: ‘What a shame we reopened it all. Just trouble.’ White may have been genuinely astounded by events, or he may simply have been playing a part. Philby’s defection might be embarrassing, but it had also solved a problem. C’s colleagues noted that while he professed surprise at Philby’s vanishing act, White, the head of MI6, did not seem unduly ‘disappointed’.

To Elliott fell the delicate, and exceedingly unpleasant, task of breaking the news to James Angleton. The FBI knew about the confrontation in Beirut and Philby’s confession, but the CIA had been kept entirely in the dark. ‘I tried to repair the damage by telephoning Jim Angleton,’ Elliott later said, ‘but it was too late.’ Angleton was publicly incensed, and privately mortified. Like Elliott, he now had to ‘face the awful truth and acknowledge that his British friend, hero, and mentor had been a senior KGB agent’. This master spy had been taken in by a spy far more adept than he. The long liquid lunches, the secrets spilled so easily more than a decade earlier, the death and disappearance of so many agents sent to make secret war in the Soviet bloc; it had all been part of a brutal game, which Philby had won, hands down. The impact of that traumatic discovery would have far-reaching consequences for America and the world. In the short term, Angleton set about doctoring the record, putting it about that he had always suspected Philby, had kept him under surveillance, and would have trapped him but for British incompetence – fictions that he would propagate and cling to, obsessively, for the rest of his life. But the truth was in the files. Each of the thirty-six meetings Philby attended at CIA headquarters between 1949 and 1951 had been typed up in a separate memo by Angleton’s secretary Gloria Loomis; every one of the discussions at Harvey’s restaurant was carefully recorded. Everything that Angleton had ever told Philby, and thus the precise human and political cost of their friendship, was on paper, stored in an archive under the direct control of the chief of CIA counter-intelligence, James Angleton. Years later, the CIA conducted an internal search for these files: every single one has vanished. ‘I had them burned,’ Angleton told MI5 officer Peter Wright. ‘It was all very embarrassing.’

Philby’s former friends and colleagues found themselves combing back over the years they had known him, searching for clues. The more candid among them acknowledged they had never suspected him. Others claimed that they had doubted his loyalty since the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Still others now claimed that they had always seen through him, proving that the least trustworthy people are those who claim to have seen it all coming, after it has all come. The most honest admitted that Philby’s ruthless charm had seduced them utterly. Glen Balfour-Paul, whose dinner party Philby skipped on the night he vanished, wrote: ‘He was an unforgivable traitor to his country, responsible among much else for the assassination by his Soviet associates of many brave men. All I can say is that in the half of him that I knew (the deceitful half, of course) he was a most enjoyable friend.’

Miles Copeland was ‘dumbfounded’ by Philby’s ‘unbelievable’ defection, concluding: ‘He was the best actor in the world’ – a reaction that rather undermines his later claim to have kept Philby under surveillance, on Angleton’s orders, during the Beirut years. Copeland had been duped like everyone else, and offered a clear-eyed assessment of the damage inflicted by the KGB’s most effective spy: ‘What Philby provided was feedback about the CIA’s reactions. They [the KGB] could accurately determine whether or not reports fed to the CIA were believed or not . . . what it comes to, is that when you look at the whole period from 1944 to 1951, the entire Western intelligence effort, which was pretty big, was what you might call minus advantage. We’d have been better off doing nothing.’

In March 1963, under intense pressure from the media, the British government was forced to acknowledge that Philby was missing. Three months later, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, issued a statement, declaring: ‘Since Mr Philby resigned from the Foreign Service in 1951, twelve years ago, he has had no access of any kind to any official information.’ That same month, Philby was granted Soviet citizenship. ‘Hello, Mr Philby’ ran the headline in Izvestia, the official Soviet newspaper, accompanied by a sketch of the defector in Pushkin Square. And so began the Great Philby Myth: the super-spy who had bamboozled Britain, divulged her secrets and those of her allies for thirty years, and then escaped to Moscow in a final triumphant coup de théâtre, leaving the wrong-footed dupes of MI6 wringing their hands in dismay. That myth, occasionally spruced up by Russian propaganda and eagerly propagated by Philby himself, has held firm ever since.

But there were some to whom the story of Philby’s daring night-time getaway did not quite ring true. ‘Philby was allowed to escape,’ wrote Desmond Bristow. ‘Perhaps he was even encouraged. To have brought him back to England and convicted as a traitor would have been even more embarrassing; and when they convicted him, could they really have hanged him?’ That view was echoed in Moscow. Yuri Modin, the canny Soviet case officer, wrote: ‘To my mind the whole business was politically engineered. The British government had nothing to gain by prosecuting Philby. A major trial, to the inevitable accompaniment of spectacular revelation and scandal, would have shaken the British establishment to its foundations.’ Far from being caught out by Philby’s defection, ‘the secret service had actively encouraged him to slip away’, wrote Modin. Many in the intelligence world believed that by leaving the door open to Moscow and then walking away, Elliott had deliberately forced Philby into exile. And they may have been right.

Divining Elliott’s precise motives is impossible, because for the next thirty years he carefully obscured and muddied them. To some, he played the role of the sucker, describing Philby’s flight as a shock, and claiming that the possibility of defection had never occurred to him. But to others, he gave the opposite impression: that he was entirely unsurprised by Philby’s flight, because he had engineered it. In a book written years later under KGB supervision, Philby depicted his defection as the heroic checkmate move of the grandmaster: ‘I knew exactly how to handle it,’ he wrote. ‘How could they have stopped me?’ The answer: very easily. Simply posting a Watcher on Rue Kantari would have made it all but impossible for Philby to flee. But no such effort was made. As Modin wrote, ‘spiriting Philby out of Lebanon was child’s play’, because Elliott and MI6 had made it so easy – suspiciously easy, in Modin’s mind.

There are two, diametrically opposed interpretations of Philby’s flight to Moscow: according to the first, Philby was the virtuoso spy, and Elliott the fool; according to the second, those roles were reversed. Under the first scenario, Philby took the decision, waited until British intelligence was looking the other way, and ran. The ease of his defection, he wrote, was the result of British blundering, ‘a mistake, simple stupidity’. This version of events requires the assumption that MI6 was not merely inefficient and naive, but quite astonishingly dim. A second, more plausible story goes like this: Elliott successfully extracted the confession that ensured Philby was now under MI6 control; he made it crystal clear that Philby’s continued liberty was dependent on his continued cooperation; then, perhaps with the connivance of Dick White, he stepped away, spread the rumour that Lunn had gone skiing, and allowed Philby to believe the coast was clear, the road to Moscow wide open.

Among those who thought that Elliott, and not Philby, had won the last round, was Kim Philby himself. He left Beirut thinking he had jumped; only later did Philby come to believe that he had been pushed.

*

Kim Philby was welcomed to Moscow by the KGB, given a thorough medical examination, and installed in a flat, luxurious by Soviet standards. A minder was appointed to guard him. He was given a salary of about £200 a month, and a promise that his children would be financially supported back in Britain. The KGB agreed to bring furniture and furnishings from Beirut, including an oak table given to him by Tommy Harris. Two of his favourite pipes were purchased in Jermyn Street, and shipped to Moscow in the diplomatic bag. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were both living in Moscow, although they had by now fallen out, partly as a result of an incident during which a drunken Burgess had urinated in the fireplace of the Chinese embassy. The spy’s circumstances had changed, but his habits not at all. In the summer of 1963, he died of liver failure, leaving Philby his 4,000-book library. Philby did not see him before he died, though he later claimed that he had been prevented from doing so by his Russian handlers. ‘Burgess was a bit of an embarrassment here,’ he told the journalist Phillip Knightley. Philby had books, his pipes, furniture and rugs; now he wanted his wife.

In May, four months after Philby’s disappearance, Eleanor Philby flew to London. The press was now rampaging all over the story of the defection of the Third Man, and lying in wait for her. A few weeks earlier an ‘unmistakably Russian’ man had appeared at her door, and declared, ‘I’m from Kim. He wants you to join him. I’m here to help.’ She refused the offer, reported it to Elliott, and arrived in Britain in a state of utter confusion, still uncertain where her husband was, and not knowing whether to believe the stories about his espionage and defection.

Nicholas Elliott sent a car to pick her up from the airport to escape the press. He found her a doctor to treat a swollen ankle, and then, once she was back on her feet, took her out to lunch. When Eleanor brought up the subject of reuniting with Philby, Elliott was insistent: ‘Kim was an active communist agent and [she] should on no account contemplate going to Moscow.’ He warned her: ‘They probably won’t let you out, if you go.’ Eleanor was struck, once again, by Elliott’s ‘surprising tenderness’, but was still reluctant to accept that her husband was a Soviet spy. Elliott offered to summon the head of MI6 himself, in order to persuade her. Dick White appeared within the hour, and Elliott installed them together in the sitting room of Wilton Street with coffee and a bottle of brandy. White was courteous, adamant, and only slightly untruthful. ‘We have definitely known for the last seven years that Kim has been working for the Russians without pay,’ he said. White had suspected Philby for far longer than that, but had discovered clear-cut proof of his guilt less than a year earlier. By the end of the afternoon, Eleanor Philby was in floods of tears, woozy on sedatives and brandy, but finally convinced that her husband was indeed a spy. She had been, in her words, ‘the victim of a prolonged and monstrous confidence trick’, yet she was still determined to join the conman in Moscow.

In September she received another letter from Kim: ‘All I am thinking of now is seeing you.’ Elliott did everything he could to dissuade her from going. One day he bought her a ticket to see Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, in which a community is attacked by avian marauders. ‘I don’t know what he had in mind, except perhaps to demoralise me,’ she later wrote. This was, perhaps, Elliott’s way of warning Eleanor that a life that seems calm and secure can swiftly turn to nightmare. She was unmoved, and a few days later found herself in the office of the smiling Soviet consul, who told her to be ready to fly to Moscow in two days, before handing over £500 in cash: ‘Buy yourself some very warm clothes.’

When Eleanor announced she was leaving, Elliott mobilised his own wife in a last-ditch attempt to get her to see sense.

‘What would you do if the man you loved went behind the Iron Curtain?’ Eleanor asked Elizabeth, as they drank tea.

The idea of Nicholas Elliott defecting to the USSR was so preposterous that Elizabeth found it hard not to laugh. But as Eleanor wrote later, ‘she finally admitted that she would do the same thing I was planning to do’.

Elliott feared that Eleanor might be trapped for ever in Russia, and believed that any attempt to resume her marriage to Philby was doomed. Yet he could not help admiring her bravery, and the ‘passionate loyalty and devotion’ that the betrayer could still inspire. ‘Although I had put the fear of God into her she was determined to return to Moscow and have it out with him. She left the next day.’

Eleanor flew to Moscow on 26 September 1963, and landed at the airport disguised in a turban and dark glasses. Philby and his minder were waiting. ‘Eleanor, is that you?’ he said.

*

Late one night, a few weeks later, Elliott heard a soft thump as a letter, delivered by hand, dropped into the letter box at 13 Wilton Street. Inside was a typewritten letter, and an empty envelope addressed to Kim Philby at PO Box 509, Central Post Office, Moscow. The letter carried no postmark, date or letterhead, but the handwriting was unmistakable.

Dear Nick,

I wonder if this letter will surprise you. Our last transactions were so strange that I cannot help thinking that perhaps you wanted me to do a fade.

I am more than thankful for your friendly interventions at all times. I would have got in touch with you earlier, but I thought it better to let time do its work on the case.

It is invariably with pleasure that I remember our meetings and talks. They did much to help one get one’s bearings in this complicated world! I deeply appreciate, now as ever, our old friendship, and I hope that rumours which have reached me about your having had some trouble on my account, are exaggerated.

It would be bitter to feel that I might have been a source of trouble to you, but I am buoyed up by my confidence that you will have found a way out of any difficulties that may have beset you.

I have often thought that there are a number of questions connected with the whole story that might interest you, and it might be helpful all round if we could get together as in old times and discuss matters of mutual interest. After careful thought, I have come to the conclusion that Helsinki, which you could reach without difficulty, would be a suitable rendezvous – or perhaps Berlin?

I am enclosing an unsealed, addressed envelope. In the event of your agreeing to my proposal, would you post it, enclosing some view of Tower Bridge? On receipt of your letter, I will write again, through the same channel, and make suggestions about the admin. side of the rendezvous.

As you have probably guessed, I am sending this letter by ‘safe hand’ to your private address for obvious reasons. You will, of course, treat this as a wholly private communication concerning only our two selves. At least, I hope you will see your way to follow my advice in this matter.

Guy’s death was a bitter blow. He had been very ill for a long time, and only his ox-like constitution enabled him to live as long as he did. What a pity we shall never be able to gather à trois at Pruniers!

Let me hear from you soon.

Love to Elizabeth (to whom by the way, you had better not disclose the contents of this letter – nor to anyone else of course).

Elliott was astonished. Philby wrote as if his betrayal had been no more than a hiccup in their long friendship. It was as if Vermehren, Volkov, the pixies and the countless others betrayed to their deaths had never existed. Was he trying to lure Elliott into a trap? Or was this an attempt to persuade him to turn double agent, to change his bearings in this ‘complicated world’? The sending of a blank postcard of Tower Bridge would convey a message that the KGB could interpret: was this intended to show that Philby was acting without KGB approval, and therefore a hint that he was prepared to be reeled back in, to ‘discuss matters of mutual interest’? Elliott’s initial reaction was one of outrage. ‘It was ridiculous to suppose that I would agree to meet him behind the backs of my boss and my wife.’ The old Philby charm, laced with bravado, was there in abundance, with its allusion to their valued friendship, and the hope that he had not damaged his friend’s career. Elliott decided that the letter must be ‘an incredibly clumsy piece of KGB disinformation, obviously designed to throw doubts on my loyalty’. The next morning he took the letter in to MI6 headquarters, and showed it to Dick White, who was equally intrigued. The strange missive prompted ‘many hours of discussion as to what, if anything, should be done about it’. Elliott was in favour of setting up a meeting, ‘because first, I was certainly fitter than he was, and secondly because I could choose the rendezvous’. He was overruled.

The key to Philby’s intentions may lie in the first line of the letter. He wanted to know, once and for all, whether Elliott had deliberately cornered him into defecting. Trading once more on their friendship, he hoped to find out if, in the end, he had really won the battle of manipulation, whether he had outmanoeuvred Elliott, or the other way round.

Elliott did not give him that satisfaction, but he did send back a last, unmistakably barbed message, a blunt reference to just one ‘tragic episode’ among so many, and just one of the many people Philby had destroyed, an epitaph for a friendship brutally betrayed: ‘Put some flowers for me on poor Volkov’s grave.’

See Notes on Chapter 19