Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Before Burgess left Washington, Philby had made him promise he would not flee with Maclean to Moscow. ‘Don’t go with him when he goes. If you do, that’ll be the end of me. Swear that you won’t.’ 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. But finally he had agreed, apparently on the understanding that he could steer Maclean to Moscow and then return and resume his life just as before. The Soviets had other plans: Burgess and Maclean were travelling on one-way tickets. As Modin wrote: ‘The Centre had concluded that we had not one, but two burnt-out agents on our hands. Burgess had lost most of his former value to us . . . Even if he retained his job, he could never again feed intelligence to the KGB as he had done before. He was finished.’ What the Soviets had failed to take properly into account was the knock-on impact the double defection would have on Kim Philby. Modin later acknowledged that allowing Burgess to leave with Maclean had been an error. In the spy world, nothing is supposed to occur by accident, but in this case, Modin’s explanation was probably true: ‘It just happened . . . intelligence services do silly things sometimes.’
The
Falaise
was popular with wealthy adulterers wanting to take their mistresses on a weekend cross-Channel jaunt. There were no passport controls, and few questions asked. In theory the ship cruised off the coast of France, but unofficially she always put in at St Malo for a few hours of French food and sightseeing. The ship docked at 11.45 the next morning. Burgess and Maclean left their luggage on board, filed down the gangplank with the other passengers, and then slipped away from the crowds. They caught a taxi to the station at Rennes, a train to Paris, and then another train to Berne in Switzerland, where Nicholas Elliott, wholly unaware of the presence of the two fugitives on his patch, was enjoying dinner at the Schweizerhof Hotel.
Elliott considered the hotel restaurant one of the finest in Europe, with particularly good foie gras. ‘I have never tasted better,’ Elliott insisted, ‘even in Strasbourg.’ The maître d’, Théo, was one of Elliott’s paid informants, and always managed to find him a table. Saturday night dinner at the Schweizerhof had become something of an Elliott tradition.
On the evening of 26 May, while Elliott was tucking into his foie gras, a taxi pulled up outside the Soviet embassy, less than a mile away. Elliott would have recognised both passengers. Burgess had been a frequent guest at the Harris parties, and he, Philby and Elliott had often dined together at Pruniers restaurant on Piccadilly. Burgess had once applied for a teaching post at Eton, but was turned down when Claude Elliott discovered how unsuitable he was. ‘It seems a pity the Foreign Office did not take the trouble to make a similar inquiry,’ Elliott later reflected ruefully. He had also met Maclean on several occasions.
A few hours later, Burgess and Maclean re-emerged from the Soviet embassy carrying fake passports in false names. They then took another train to Zurich, where they boarded a plane bound for Stockholm, with a stopover in Prague. At Prague airport, now safely behind the Iron Curtain, the two men walked out of the arrivals hall and were whisked into a waiting car.
On Monday morning, the Watchers watched in vain as the train from Tatsfield pulled into Victoria Station with no Maclean aboard. A little later, Melinda Maclean called the Foreign Office to report that her husband had left the house on Friday night with a man named ‘Roger Styles’, and she had not seen him since. The Foreign Office put a call through to MI5. Special Branch reported that a car, hired by Guy Burgess, had been abandoned at Southampton docks. A flush of dawning horror began to spread across the British government.
The Foreign Office sent out an urgent telegram to embassies and MI6 stations throughout Europe, with instructions that Burgess and Maclean be apprehended ‘at all costs and by all means’. A Missing Persons poster gave a description of the fugitives. ‘Maclean: 6’3”, normal build, short hair, brushed back, part on left side, slight stoop, thin tight lips, long thin legs, sloppy dressed, chain smoker, heavy drinker. Burgess: 5’9”, slender build, dark complexion, dark curly hair, tinged with grey, chubby face, clean shaven, slightly pigeon-toed’. In Berne, Elliott gave orders to his own Watchers to keep a careful eye on the Soviet embassy. One of his colleagues prepared a ‘decanter of poisoned Scotch’, just in case the notoriously thirsty fugitives turned up and needed to be immobilised. By that time, Burgess and Maclean were already being toasted in Moscow.
The morning after the discovery of Burgess and Maclean’s disappearance, a long, coded telegram arrived at the British embassy in Washington, marked Top Secret. Geoffrey Paterson, the MI5 representative in Washington, called Kim Philby at home to ask if he could borrow his secretary, Edith Whitfield, to help decipher it. Philby was happy to oblige. A few hours later, he found Paterson in his embassy office, grey-faced.
‘Kim,’ Paterson half-whispered. ‘The bird has flown.’
‘What bird?’ said Philby, arranging his features to register the appropriate consternation. ‘Not Maclean?’
‘Yes, but there’s worse than that . . .
Guy Burgess
has gone with him.’
Philby’s alarm was now unfeigned. Burgess had been his houseguest until a few weeks earlier. Philby was one of the few people apprised of the Homer investigation, and in a position to warn Maclean. All three had been at Cambridge together. It was only a matter of time – and probably very little time – before MI5 took an interest in his friendship with Burgess, and started digging into his past. Philby realised, as his Soviet handlers apparently did not, just how seriously Burgess’s flight would threaten his own position. He might be placed under surveillance at any moment, sacked, or even arrested. He had to move fast.
An emergency plan was already in place. If MI5 seemed to be closing in, the Soviets would provide money and false papers, and Philby would escape to Moscow via the Caribbean or Mexico. Makayev in New York had been instructed to leave $2,000 and a message at a dead letter drop for precisely this purpose. He failed to do so. Philby never received the money. Makayev was later disciplined for this failure by his superiors in Moscow, who noted his ‘lack of discipline’ and ‘crude manners’: it seems likely that he simply spent the money on his ballet dancer.
The British embassy was in secret uproar, as news spread that not one, but two senior Foreign Office officials in Washington had vanished, and were probably Soviet spies. Philby and Paterson together broke the embarrassing news to the FBI. Philby carefully observed the reaction of his FBI friends, including Bob Lamphere, his former dinner party guest, and saw only surprise, tinged with some wry pleasure at the British predicament. So far, Philby himself did not seem to be under suspicion. At lunchtime, Philby told Paterson he was going home for ‘a stiff drink’, behaviour that anyone who knew him would have considered perfectly normal. Back at Nebraska Avenue, Philby headed not for the drinks cabinet but for the potting shed, where he collected a trowel, and then down to the basement that had, until recently, housed Guy Burgess. There he retrieved from a hiding place the Russian camera, tripod and film given to him by Makayev, sealed the lot in waterproof containers and placed them in the boot of his car. Then he climbed in, gunned the engine, and drove north. Aileen was at home with the children; if she thought it strange that her husband should come home from work early, lock himself in the basement, and then drive away without a word, she did not say so.
Philby had travelled the road to Great Falls many times. Angleton had taken him fishing in the Potomac Valley and there was a faux-English pub called the Old Angler’s Inn where they had spent several convivial evenings. The road was little used, and heavily wooded. On a deserted stretch, with woods on one side and the river on the other, Philby parked, extracted the containers and trowel, and headed into the trees. He emerged after a few minutes, casually doing up his fly buttons for the benefit of any passers-by, and drove home. Somewhere in a shallow hole in the woods beside the Potomac lies a cache of Soviet photographic equipment that has lain buried for more than sixty years, a secret memorial to Philby’s spycraft.
If Philby was going to make his escape, and join Burgess and Maclean in exile, then now was the moment. But he did not run. He decided to stay and try to bluff it out. Philby later framed this choice (as he interpreted most of his own behaviour) in terms of principle: ‘My clear duty was to fight it out.’ But the decision was also calculated: the FBI did not yet suspect him, so presumably the same must be true of MI5. No one had identified ‘Stanley’. If and when they explored his past, the evidence they might find was mostly circumstantial. His early dabblings with left-wing politics were hardly secret, and he had told Valentine Vivian of his marriage to Litzi. His friendship with Burgess looked bad (back in 1940, Burgess had been instrumental in his recruitment by MI6), but then if they were really both Soviet spies, why would Philby have allowed Burgess to live in his home? ‘There is no doubt that Kim Philby is thoroughly disgusted with Burgess’s behaviour,’ wrote Liddell, after Philby contacted him to express horror at his friend’s defection.
The very act of staying put would suggest a clear conscience. True, there were some uncomfortable early clues to his real allegiance: the British spy described by the defector Krivitsky who had worked in Spain as a journalist; Volkov’s allusion to a counter-intelligence officer, and the Russian’s subsequent disappearance after Philby took over the case. Going back still further, MI6 might recall the Soviet files he had taken out from the registry at St Albans. But for a legal prosecution, MI5 would need harder evidence than this. They might suspect him, interrogate him, urge him to confess, and try to trap him. But they would find it very hard to convict him. And Philby knew it. With a cool head, and the luck that seemed to cling to him, he might yet ride out the coming storm. ‘Despite all appearances, I thought my chances were good.’
Philby had one other weapon in his armoury, perhaps the most powerful of all, and that was his capacity for friendship. Philby had powerful friends on both sides of the Atlantic, people who had worked with him and trusted him for many years. These people had witnessed his skill as an intelligence officer, shared secrets with him and drunk his Martinis. To accept Philby’s guilt would have been, in a way, to implicate themselves. ‘There must be many people in high positions,’ Philby reflected, ‘who would wish very much to see my innocence established. They would be inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt.’
Philby knew he could rely on his friends to defend him, and two above all: Jim Angleton and Nick Elliott.
11
Philby’s summons to London arrived in the form of a polite, handwritten note from his immediate superior, Jack Easton, informing him that he would shortly receive a formal telegram inviting him to come home and discuss the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Easton was one of the very few senior officers Philby respected, a man with a ‘rapier mind’, capable of ‘deeply subtle twists’. Philby later wondered if the letter was a tipoff, intended to make him flee in order to avoid a scandal. In truth it was probably just a friendly gesture, a reassurance that there was nothing to worry about. Before leaving, Philby made the rounds of his CIA and FBI contacts once more, and again detected no overt suspicion. Angleton seemed as friendly as ever. On 11 June 1951, the evening before Philby’s flight, the friends met in a bar.
‘How long will you be away?’ Angleton inquired.
‘About a week,’ said Philby nonchalantly.
‘Can you do me a favour in London?’ asked Angleton, explaining that he needed to send an urgent letter to MI6, but had missed the diplomatic bag that week. Would Philby deliver it by hand? He pushed over an envelope, addressed to the head of counter-intelligence in London. Philby later imagined that this too had been a ruse of some sort, intended to test or trap him. Paranoia was beginning to gnaw. Angleton had no inkling of suspicion: his trusted friend would deliver the letter, and return in a week, when they would have lunch together as usual, at Harvey’s. After what Philby called ‘a pleasant hour’ at the bar, discussing ‘matters of mutual concern’, Philby boarded the night plane to London. He would never see America, or Jim Angleton, again.
Dark clouds of doubt were swiftly gathering, on both sides of the Atlantic, as Philby knew they would. These would soon blow up into a storm that would knock the ‘special relationship’ off course and set Britain’s secret services at each other’s throats. The Americans might appear unruffled, but the disappearing diplomats had provoked a ‘major sensation’ in Washington. An investigation was now under way focusing on Guy Burgess and, by association, his friend, protector and landlord, Kim Philby. CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith ordered any officers with knowledge of the British pair to relate what they knew of Philby and Burgess as a matter of urgency. The first report to arrive on the CIA chief’s desk came from Bill Harvey of counter-intelligence; the second, arriving a few days later, was written by James Angleton. They were markedly different documents.
Harvey’s report – ‘highly professional, perceptive and accusatory’ – was, in effect, a denunciation of Philby. The former FBI agent would later claim to have had his suspicions about Philby long before the Burgess and Maclean defections, and at the FBI he may have had access to the Venona material. Harvey had studied the Englishman’s career with meticulous care, and he drew together the strands of evidence with devastating precision over five closely typed pages: he noted Philby’s links with Burgess, his part in the Volkov affair, his involvement in the doomed Albanian operations, and his intimate knowledge of the hunt for the spy ‘Homer’, which had placed him in an ideal position to warn Maclean of his impending arrest. None of these alone amounted to proof of guilt, but taken together, Harvey argued, they pointed to only one conclusion: ‘Philby was a Soviet spy.’ Philby later described Harvey’s condemnation as ‘a retrospective exercise in spite’, personal revenge for the offence given to his wife at Philby’s disastrous dinner party just six months earlier.