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‘The Friends n. General slang for members of an intelligence service; specifically British slang for members of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.’
This is not another biography of Kim Philby. Rather, it is an attempt to describe a particular sort of friendship that played an important role in history, told in the form of a narrative. It is less about politics, ideology and accountability than personality, character, and a very British relationship that has never been explored before.
Two middle-aged spies are sitting in an apartment in the Christian Quarter, sipping tea and lying courteously to one another, as evening approaches. They are English; so English that the habit of politeness that binds them together and keeps them apart, never falters for a moment.
Nicholas Elliott was not obviously cut out to be a spy. His academic record was undistinguished. He knew little about the complexities of international politics, let alone the dextrous and dangerous game being played by MI6 in the run-up to war.
Eccentricity is one of those English traits that looks like frailty but masks a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.
Elliott left his prep school with the conviction that ‘nothing as unpleasant could ever recur’, an ingrained contempt for authority, and a hardy sense of humour.
Before leaving, Elliott underwent a course in code-training at the Foreign Office. His instructor was one Captain John King, a veteran cipher clerk who was also, as it happened, a Soviet spy. King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott’s first tutor in secrecy was a double agent.
Even the innocuous Captain John King, the cipher clerk who had taught Elliott coding, was now in prison, serving a ten-year sentence for spying, after a Soviet defector revealed that he had been ‘selling everything to Moscow’ for cash.
Miss Marjorie Maxse was chief organisation officer for the Conservative Party, a role that apparently equipped her to identify people who would be good at spreading propaganda and blowing things up. Philby found her ‘intensely likeable’.
Hugh Trevor-Roper was another new recruit to wartime intelligence. One of the cleverest, and rudest, men in England, Trevor-Roper (later the historian Lord Dacre) had hardly a good word for any of his colleagues (‘by and large pretty stupid, some of them very stupid’).
Philby’s father nicknamed his son Kim after the eponymous hero in the popular Rudyard Kipling novel. Brought up by an Indian nanny, Philby’s first language was a sort of nursery Punjabi; like Kipling’s Kim, he was a white child who could pass for an Indian.
The soil that grew Kim Philby had produced a conventional upper-class, public school-educated Englishman; the life that fed him had created something entirely different, and it was a life that his dear friend Nicholas Elliott knew nothing about.
In the autumn of 1933, Philby travelled to Vienna, ostensibly to improve his German before applying to join the Foreign Office – in reality to witness, and if possible take part in, the battle between left and right then under way in the Austrian capital.
Deutsch had relatives in the UK, notably his wealthy cousin Oscar, the founder of the Odeon cinema chain, which was said to stand for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation’. One Deutsch was doing well out of British capitalism; the other was hellbent on destroying it.
In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.
‘Of all the passions,’ wrote Lewis, ‘the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.’
In the summer of 1939, with Franco victorious in Spain, Philby returned to London to a warm reception from his colleagues at The Times. There was no equivalent welcome from his Soviet spy friends, for the simple reason that they were all dead, or had disappeared, swept away by Stalin’s Terror.
And so began a bizarre situation in which Philby told Moscow the truth, and was disbelieved, because the truth contradicted Moscow’s expectations.
Philby was delighted by Elliott’s success, his growing reputation and the news of his marriage. Nicholas Elliott was a rising star in the service, and a valued friend, and no one understood the value of friendship better than Kim Philby.
One of the richer ironies of Philby’s position is that while he could do no wrong in British eyes, in Moscow he continued to be viewed with mistrust.
But as the war headed to its climax, Philby’s espionage career was about to enter a new and much more lethal phase, in which he would help to destroy not Nazi spies, but ordinary men and women whose only crime was to oppose the political creed he had espoused. Philby would soon kill for the communist cause and Nicholas Elliott, unwittingly, would help him.
After the war, Allied officers went in search of the anticommunist activists identified by the Vermehrens, people who ‘could have formed the backbone of a Conservative Christian post-war German political leadership’. They found none of them: ‘All had been deported or liquidated.’
In the summer of 1945, after only a few months in post, he was invited to meet Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary. One of Britain’s earliest Cold Warriors, Bevin remarked over lunch: ‘Communists and communism are vile. It is the duty of all members of the service to stamp upon them at every possible opportunity.’ Elliott never forgot those words, for they mirrored the philosophy he would take into his new role.
Philby had hitherto refused to marry Aileen, despite her entreaties, for the simple reason that he was already married, to a foreign communist.
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.
Six months earlier Bido Kuka had been recruited for Operation Valuable in a displaced persons camp outside Rome. Kuka was a ‘Ballist’, a member of the Balli Kombëtar, the Albanian nationalist group who had fought the Nazis during the war, and then the communists after it.
Angleton explained how the CIA had taken over the anti-Soviet spy network established by Reinhard Gehlen, the former chief of German intelligence on the Eastern Front who had offered his services to the US after surrendering in 1945. Gehlen’s spies and informants included many former Nazis, but the CIA was not choosy about its allies in the new war against communism.
Philby liked to portray the Soviet intelligence service as an organisation of unparalleled efficiency. In truth, Moscow Centre was frequently beset by bureaucratic bungling, inertia and incompetence, coupled with periodic blood-letting.
As the investigators dug deeper, Philby kept Moscow informed of their progress. ‘Maclean should stay in his post as long as possible,’ Moscow Centre told him, while noting that it might be necessary to extract him ‘before the net closed in’.
Modin, however, had insisted that Burgess must accompany Maclean. Burgess at first objected. He pointed out that he had no desire to defect and found the prospect of life in Moscow perfectly ghastly.
Many of Philby’s colleagues in MI6 would cling to that presumption of innocence as an article of faith. To accept otherwise would be to admit that they had all been fooled; it would make the intelligence and diplomatic services look entirely idiotic. MI5, however, had been making inquiries, and already convivial, clubbable Kim Philby was beginning to take on a more sinister shape.
White first asked about Maclean: Philby said he remembered him from Cambridge, and knew him by reputation, but had not seen him for years and probably would not even recognise him.
But among those convinced of Philby’s guilt was one who knew him better than anyone else, and who was finding it ever harder to remain silent; and that was his wife.
Footage of Philby’s famous press conference is still used as a training tool by MI6, a master class in mendacity.
Despite the storm raging around him over the Crabb affair, Elliott had found time to demonstrate his own peculiarly durable brand of loyalty. He had done what he promised to do, and what no one (including Philby) had believed was possible: he had engineered Philby’s return to MI6.
Once again, Elliott and Philby’s lives seemed to move in parallel: while Philby headed to the Middle East, Elliott took up a new job as MI6 station chief in Vienna. Usually so ebullient, Elliott could summon little enthusiasm for his new posting. Vienna, he wrote, ‘had an ersatz gaiety and smelled of corruption’.
Beirut was exotic, tense and dangerous, a salmagundi of races, religions and politics, rendered even more febrile by the rising tide of Arab nationalism and Cold War conflict. It was fertile ground for journalism in 1956, and an even better place for espionage.
Like most people who proclaim themselves free spirits, she was fiercely conventional.
Philby spent Christmas with the Brewers. Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife.
Philby could have put an end to his double life at that moment. He could have explained to Petukhov that he had no interest in discussing Arab economics with him, and so conveyed a message to the KGB that he was no longer in the game. Other agents recruited in the 1930s, including Anthony Blunt, had successfully disengaged from Soviet intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
Rising to leave, Philby suggested dinner at his flat that evening. Eleanor knew Elliott was in Beirut, and if he failed to pay a visit she would wonder why.
Elliott could not have made it easier for Philby to flee, whether intentionally or otherwise. In defiance of every rule of intelligence, he left Beirut without making any provision for monitoring a man who had just confessed to being a double agent:
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.
Kim Philby did not love Moscow, and Moscow did not love him, though both tried to pretend otherwise.
James Angleton was forced out of the CIA in 1974, when the extent of his illegal mole-hunting was revealed.
Nicholas Elliott’s career was hobbled by his association with Philby. Some in MI6 believed he had allowed Philby to flee Beirut out of personal loyalty. Some still do.
