A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

by Ben Macintyre

In some ways, Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs. 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. Westminster School and Cambridge University are elite clubs; MI6 is an even more exclusive fellowship; working secretly for the NKVD within MI6 placed Philby in a club of one, the most elite member of a secret inner ring. “Of all the passions,” wrote Lewis, “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

The papal legate, Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who would later become Pope John XXIII, proved to be a fund of good intelligence and a vigorous antifascist. Like so many in wartime Istanbul, Roncalli was playing a double game, dining with Papen and taking his wife’s confession while using his office to smuggle Jewish refugees out of occupied Europe. A few months after they became friends, Elliott discovered that Roncalli’s assistant, one Monsignor Rici, “a most unattractive little man,” was a spy “operating a clandestine wireless set on behalf of the Italian military intelligence.” Elliott tipped off the Turkish secret police and had Rici arrested. When he informed Roncalli, with some embarrassment, that his assistant was likely to be spending a considerable period breaking rocks in an Anatolian penal colony, the future pope merely shrugged, leaving Elliott with the strong impression that he “was not altogether displeased.”

MI6 was White’s Club; MI5 was the Rotary Club; MI6 was upper-middle class (and sometimes aristocratic); MI5 was middle class (and sometimes working class). In the minute gradations of social stratification that meant so much in Britain, MI5 was “below the salt,” a little common, and MI6 was gentlemanly, elitist, and old school tie. MI5 were hunters; MI6 were gatherers. Philby’s patronizing dismissal of Dick White as “nondescript” precisely reflected MI6’s attitude to its sister service: White, as his biographer puts it, was “pure trade,” whereas Philby was “establishment.” MI5 looked up at MI6 with resentment; MI6 looked down with a small but ill-hidden sneer. The looming battle over Philby was yet another skirmish in Britain’s never-ending, hard-fought, and entirely ludicrous class war.

Nicholas Elliott should have been fired for what one colleague called a “one man Bay of Pigs.” Astonishingly, he survived—if not unscathed, then at least unsacked, an outcome that would have been highly unlikely in any other organization. As Elliott had himself demonstrated, this was a club that looked after its members. With typical insouciance he wrote: “A storm in a teacup was blown up by ineptitude into a major diplomatic incident which reflected unjustifiable discredit on MI6. The incompetence lay on the shoulders of the politicians, most notably Eden, in the way the matter was handled.” Elliott remained in post as London station chief, flatly denying that he, or anyone else in the intelligence services, was to blame. For the rest of his life Elliott defended the memory of Buster Crabb, insisting that his friend had perished in the line of duty. “Crabb was both brave and patriotic,” wrote Elliott. “Qualities which inspired him to volunteer to do what he did.”

Crabb had proven his loyalty and that, in Elliott’s world, was all that mattered.

Philby would later frame his decision as one of ideological purity, consistent with the “total commitment to the Soviet Union” he had made at the age of twenty-one. He did what he did, in his own estimation, out of pure political conviction, the guiding principle of his life. He looked with disdain on others who had seen the horrors of Stalinism and abandoned ship. “I stayed the course,” he wrote, “in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberration of individuals.” Philby later claimed that he had experienced moments of doubt and that his views had been “influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime.” But there is no evidence that he ever questioned the ideology he had discovered at Cambridge, changed his opinions, or seriously acknowledged the iniquities of practical communism. Philby never shared or discussed his views, either with friend or foe. Instead, he retained and sustained his faith, without the need for priests or fellow believers, in perfect isolation. Philby regarded himself as an ideologue and a loyalist; in truth, he was a dogmatist, valuing only one opinion, his own.

But there was more than politics in Philby’s eager return to the embrace of the KGB. Philby enjoyed deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce. Some men like to parade their knowledge. Others revel in the possession of information that they decline to share, and the private sense of superiority that this brings. Philby was a faithless husband, but a kind lover, a good friend, a gentle father, and a generous host. He had a talent for tenderness. But he also relished withholding the truth from those he was closest to; there was the Philby they knew, and then there was the Philby only he knew. The alcohol helped maintain the double life, for an alcoholic has already become divorced from his or her real self, hooked on an artificial reality. Philby did not want to give up spying, and he probably could not have stopped if he had wanted to: he was addicted.

The major players in the Philby story were invariably wise after the event. Spies, even more than most people, invent the past to cover up mistakes. The Philby case has probably attracted more retrospective conspiracy theories than any other in the history of espionage: Dick White of MI6 was running a ruse to trap him; Nicholas Elliott was secretly jousting with him; James Angleton suspected him and set Miles Copeland to spy on him; Philby’s fellow journalists (another tribe adept at misremembering the past) later claimed that they had always seen something fishy in his behavior. Even Eleanor, his wife, would later look back and claim to have discovered clues to his real nature. No one likes to admit they have been utterly conned. The truth was simpler, as it almost always is: Philby was spying on everyone, and no one was spying on him, because he fooled them all.

“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.”