Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
In the autumn of 1956, Eleanor Brewer told her husband that she was leaving him. Sam Brewer, who had finally cottoned on to his wife’s torrid affair, raised no objection, and Eleanor returned to Seattle with her daughter, telling Philby she would get a ‘Mexican Divorce’, which was quicker and cheaper than the American variety since the spouse did not need to be present. The only remaining obstacle was Aileen Philby.
*
Since Philby’s departure, Aileen had hurtled downhill. She was virtually penniless, deeply unhappy and usually drunk. Philby complained of Aileen’s ‘idleness’, and claimed she spent most of her time at point-to-point races. He refused to send her more cash until she explained what she was spending it on. ‘No receipts, no money,’ he said. She spent longer and longer periods in psychiatric hospitals. Her old friend Flora Solomon dispatched Stuart Lisbona, of the Marks and Spencer Pensions Department, to keep a ‘helpful eye’ on ‘poor Aileen . . . abandoned by her husband’.
On 12 December 1957, Aileen Philby was discovered dead in the bedroom of the house in Crowborough. Her friends believed she had killed herself, with drink and pills. Her psychiatrist suspected, fantastically, that she ‘might have been murdered’ by Philby, because she knew too much. The coroner ruled she had died from heart failure, myocardial degeneration, tuberculosis, and a respiratory infection having contracted influenza. Her alcoholism undoubtedly accelerated her death. She was forty-seven.
Elliott was deeply upset when news of Aileen’s tragic end reached him in Vienna. She had shown ‘considerable strength of character’ throughout her suffering, and he would always remember her as she had once been, ‘a charming woman, and a loving wife and mother’. But he could not bring himself to blame Philby for her death, which he ascribed to Aileen’s ‘grave mental problem’. Not so Flora Solomon, who held Philby directly and personally responsible. ‘I endeavoured to strike him from my memory,’ she wrote. ‘This, however, was not to be.’
Richard Beeston and his wife Moyra were Christmas shopping in Beirut’s Bab Idriss, when they were spotted by Kim Philby, who rushed across the road: ‘I have wonderful news darlings,’ he said excitedly. ‘I want you to come and celebrate.’ Philby dragged the Beestons off to the Normandie, plied them with drink, and then produced a telegram from England informing him of Aileen’s death. It was, he said, a ‘wonderful escape’, as he was now free to marry ‘a wonderful American girl’. The Beestons were ‘stunned’.
The Furse family took over all the arrangements for her funeral back in England, which Philby did not attend. The five Philby children never knew where their mother was buried.
It took another seven months for Eleanor to obtain her divorce. When it was finalised, she at once sent a telegram to Philby, who cabled back: ‘Clever wonderful you fly back happily song in heart life is miraculous greatest love Kim.’ The same morning, Philby rushed to the St Georges to find Sam Brewer. Their conversation, as described by Eleanor herself, is one of the classic exchanges between a cuckold and an adulterer:
Philby: ‘I’ve come to tell you that I’ve had a cable from Eleanor. She has got her divorce and I want you to be the first person to know that I’m going to marry her.’
Brewer: ‘That sounds like the best possible solution. What do you make of the situation in Iraq?’
Kim Philby and Eleanor Brewer were married in Holborn registry office in London on 24 January 1959, just over a year after Aileen’s death. Nicholas and Elizabeth Elliott returned from Vienna to attend the ceremony, along with other MI6 colleagues, past and present. Elliott had not forgotten Aileen, but he swiftly took Philby’s new wife to his heart: ‘Eleanor was in many ways not dissimilar to Aileen,’ he wrote. ‘She had integrity, courage and humour. Like Aileen, she could not be described as intellectual but she was certainly intelligent.’ The couple spent their honeymoon in Rome, where Philby wrote: ‘We shall take a house in the mountains: she will paint; I will write; peace and stability at last.’ Eleanor was his third wife, and the second to know nothing of his true allegiance.
Back in Beirut, the newlyweds moved into a fifth-floor flat on the Rue Kantari, with a large balcony overlooking the mountains and sea which offered a ‘ringside view’ of the civil war now engulfing Lebanon. ‘He would sit in his terrace at night and listen to the guns going off,’ Eleanor recalled. The flat was spacious enough to accommodate all their children during the holidays from boarding school. Despite the grim circumstances of Aileen’s death and Philby’s swift remarriage, his children adored him, and he remained an attentive and caring father.
And so began a period of domestic harmony, unchallenging journalism, and discreet international espionage. There were parties and picnics, and much alcohol. Eleanor described a ‘leisurely daily circuit of shopping and gossip’, starting at the Normandie (‘Kim treated the place like a club’) before moving on to the St Georges ‘to see what the other journalists were up to’. Philby hinted to his new wife that he was ‘connected with British intelligence’, but naturally provided no details. He would disappear from time to time. It never occurred to Eleanor to ask where he had been. Compared to her first husband, Philby took a relaxed, even casual, approach to journalism: ‘He seemed to write his weekly articles fast and painlessly – often dictating them to me.’ Philby’s fellow hacks considered him lazy, yet ‘compelling a certain respect’, in part because he appeared to wear his responsibilities so lightly.
Philby devoted more energy (though not much more) to intelligence-gathering. A fellow journalist noticed that he was often to be seen in the company of ‘men whose ostensible jobs as businessmen, bankers, university professors, consultants for foreign companies, and so forth, did not wholly account for their insiders’ preoccupation with Arab politics’. Whatever information of value he gleaned was handed over to Paulson of MI6; then Philby passed the same information to Petukhov of the KGB, with whatever additional intelligence might be helpful to the Soviet cause.
On both sides of the Iron Curtain, opinion in intelligence circles was divided over Philby’s usefulness. Yuri Modin, still monitoring Agent Stanley, was enthusiastic. ‘The information he supplied on British policies in the region proved invaluable to our government in our relations with Arab countries . . . I myself read several of his reports, noting with satisfaction that he had not lost his brilliant touch.’ Philby’s information ‘attracted much attention at the top’. Yet some in Moscow complained that Philby was simply peddling recycled journalism. ‘There was criticism,’ Modin noted, ‘concerning his tendency to send us hard news wrapped up in beautifully written political evaluations. We did not need this because we had our own people to make evaluations . . . the KGB had its own experts here in Moscow and in the capitals, highly trained Arabists all.’ This is an old trick of espionage: when spies obtain knowledge but not secrets, they tend to dress up mere information to make it look like intelligence; and when they do not have solid information, they fabricate it. Similar grumbling could be heard in parts of Broadway, particularly among the Arabists of MI6. ‘You could have read it all in the
Economist
last week,’ said one London analyst, after looking through Philby’s latest submission. ‘He’s got a lot of it wrong as well. It’s invented. He’s taking us to the cleaners.’ Philby’s supporters, notably Elliott and Young, ignored the carping, and circulated Philby’s reports as the latest penetrating insights from Our Man in Beirut.
In truth, Philby was going soft, and drinking hard: content to do a little journalism, a little espionage on the side for both sides, but nothing too strenuous. He was coasting, it seemed, towards quiet and comfortable irrelevance as a second-rate journalist, and a minor spy.
Then Nicholas Elliott arrived in Beirut, as the new station chief of MI6, and the wheel of their friendship turned again.
15
Beirut was another plum posting. The Crabb affair had done Nicholas Elliott’s career no lasting damage, and he had performed well during his brief stint in Vienna. Indeed, within MI6 he was still considered a high-flier, the leader of the Robber Barons. It was said that, ‘but for his preference for operations, not administration, he might well have been appointed C’. Elliott was pleased to be moving on from Austria. ‘I have no wish to be churlish about our time in Vienna,’ he wrote (Elliott’s politeness even extended to cities), ‘nevertheless we were not unhappy’ to leave. With the Middle East heating up, Beirut was an important step up the intelligence ladder. The Elliotts travelled by boat from Genoa, and as they pulled into the port, Elliott marvelled at how little Beirut had changed since his last visit in 1942. Elizabeth had been his secretary then, and he had courted her over lunch at the Hotel Lucullus, whose restaurant was famed for its French-Lebanese cuisine. As soon as they landed, Elliott announced, with romantic fanfare, they would be lunching at the Lucullus again. No sooner were they seated, than a beaming Kim Philby appeared and wrapped Elliott in a welcoming hug. ‘It was a most agreeable reunion,’ recalled Elliott, who pretended that the meeting had been accidental. He was taking over as station chief from Paul Paulson, but Philby was the person he wanted to see on his first day in Beirut. They were joined by Eleanor, an ‘excellent bouillabaisse’ was served, more bottles were opened, glasses were raised and drained. Elliott happily turned to Philby: ‘Fill me in, old boy.’
The Elliotts moved into a flat on the top floor of the Immeuble Tabet on the Rue Verdun, on the border between the Christian and Muslim quarters, not far from the Philbys. The apartment had ‘cool, high rooms, wide balconies and marble floors’ and was ‘perfect in every way’. That evening, as they listened to the muezzin’s call wafting over the city, Elliott ‘thought nostalgically of the gentle sound of the Mullahs calling the faithful to prayer from the minarets of Istanbul many years before’. He was as happy as he had ever been, and back in his element, in a foreign city seething with espionage possibilities, fighting communist aggression alongside his oldest friend, his most trusted colleague, and the man who would explain to him the mysteries of the Middle East. Once more they would be ‘two old friends in Crown service on the frontiers’.
As Eleanor Philby observed, Elliott had hitherto been a ‘European specialist and knew little of Arab politics. He came green to the Middle East.’ He had much to learn, as he admitted: ‘Apart from all the political complexities and the plotting – almost any major financial or political intrigue in the Middle East at that time had its roots in Beirut – you had to get to grips with the Lebanese character. The labyrinths of Lebanese politics were of daunting complexity.’ Philby would be his guide, ‘his personal adviser’.
The arrival of a new spy chief did not go unnoticed among Beirut’s journalists. One left this portrait of Elliott:
He was a thin, spare man with a reputation as a shrewd operator whose quick humorous glance behind round glasses gave a clue to his sardonic mind. In manner and dress he suggested an Oxbridge don at one of the smarter colleges, but with a touch of worldly ruthlessness not always evident in academic life. Foreigners liked him, appreciating his bonhomie and his fund of risqué stories. He got on particularly well with Americans. The formal, ladylike figure of his wife in the background contributed to the feeling that British intelligence in Beirut was being directed by a gentleman.
Elliott and Philby were once again inseparable, professionally and socially. The pace of Philby’s intelligence-gathering, hitherto leisurely, even lackadaisical, suddenly became frenetic, as Elliott ‘put Kim to work, setting him targets, sending him on trips, requesting reports which were then combed over in conversation’. During his first four years in Beirut, Philby had ventured outside Lebanon only as far as Syria, and once to visit his father in Saudi Arabia. Now, at Elliott’s behest, he scrambled all over the Middle East, ostensibly on newspaper assignments, to Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait and Yemen. The hitherto indolent journalist was a reporting whirlwind. But a careful observer might have spotted that his output fell far short of his industriousness; he was visiting many more places and people than he was writing about, at least publicly. In the first nine months of 1960, he filed just six stories for the
Observer
. One editor from the
Economist
paid him a visit, noted how seldom he seemed to write for the magazine, and casually asked him if he found it difficult ‘serving two masters’. Philby was momentarily speechless, until he realised she was referring to his newspaper employers, not his espionage.
Philby delivered a torrent of information to Elliott, ‘mainly political and personality reporting’ and ‘reports about political developments in most Arab states’. The two men would huddle together, for long debriefing sessions. ‘They used to meet once or twice a week,’ wrote Eleanor. ‘Vanishing into another room and leaving me to gossip with Elizabeth.’ Elliott’s support and confidence was demonstrated in other, more practical ways. Towards the end of 1960, Philby returned home late one night, clutching a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, happily scattering them around the room. ‘This is going to make our Christmas!’ Eleanor had no doubt the money came from Elliott, an early Christmas present for his best friend and most industrious agent.
Some have claimed that Elliott’s energetic deployment of Philby was merely a ruse, to see if ‘greater participation in the British intelligence effort’ would reveal contact with the Soviets. There is little evidence to support this theory. If Elliott had suspected Philby, he would have put a tail on him, and easily discovered his meetings with Petukhov. He did not. Dick White’s instructions were to ‘keep an eye on Philby’, but there was no suggestion that he should be investigated, probed or put under surveillance. White seems to have accepted, at least outwardly, that the Philby case was closed. Far from doubting him, Elliott trusted Philby completely, and his determination to employ him to the full reflected only ‘Elliott’s overt and innocent friendship’, and an admiration stretching back twenty years.