Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
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 theory 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 behaviour. Even Eleanor, his wife, would later look back, and claim to have discovered clues to his real identity. 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.
Every few weeks, on a Wednesday evening, Philby would stand holding a newspaper on his balcony; later the same night he would slip away to a nondescript backstreet restaurant in the Armenian quarter called Vrej (Armenian for ‘revenge’), where Petukhov was waiting.
For Kim Philby, these were days of professional satisfaction and domestic tranquillity. Not since 1949 had his double lives co-existed so comfortably and invisibly: admired and feted by American and British intelligence officials, protected by Elliott and Angleton, paid regularly by the
Observer
and the
Economist
, secretly by MI6 and the KGB. Evenings were spent in a social whirl on the Anglo-American diplomatic circuit. On the rare occasions they stayed in, Philby would cook, and then read German poetry to his wife in ‘a melodious voice’ without a stutter. The happy household was completed by the addition of an exotic and unlikely pet, after some friends bought a baby fox cub from a Bedouin in the Jordan Valley, and presented it to the Philbys. They called it Jackie, and reared it by hand. The animal slept on the sofa and obeyed commands, like a dog. Jackie also shared Philby’s taste for alcohol, ‘lapping up’ whisky from a saucer. ‘She was affectionate and playful, cantering round the top of the parapet of our balcony.’ Philby found the animal ‘hopelessly endearing’, and wrote a sentimental article for
Country Life
entitled ‘The Fox Who Came to Stay’.
These were the ‘happiest years’, wrote Eleanor.
Philby’s world of contented marriage and secret duplicity was about to fall apart, with two deaths, one defection and the unmasking of a Soviet spy within British intelligence who had nothing whatever to do with Kim Philby.
16
St John Philby, that rebel traditionalist, attended an Orientalists’ conference in Moscow in the summer of 1960, then the Lord’s cricket test match in London, in which England trounced South Africa, much to his satisfaction. On his way back to Saudi Arabia, he stopped off to visit his son in Beirut. At sixty-five, St John was as cantankerous and complicated as ever. He checked in to the Normandie Hotel, where he was ‘treated with the deference due to an Eastern potentate’. Nicholas Elliott threw a lunch party for him, not without trepidation, knowing the elder Philby’s capacity for extreme and unprovoked rudeness. ‘Elizabeth and I were among the few English people to whom St John Philby was prepared to be civil.’ To Elliott’s surprise, the lunch was a social and diplomatic success. Humphrey Trevelyan, the British ambassador to Iraq, who was staying with the Elliotts, ‘drew the old man out into telling us the story of his relationship with Ibn Saud’. The Philbys, the Copelands and several other friends attended this ‘memorable occasion’, lubricated by a small river of Lebanese wine.
Elliott described the ensuing events: St John Philby ‘left at tea time, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of the embassy staff in a night club, had a heart attack, and died’. The last words of this brilliant and impossible man were: ‘God, I’m bored.’ He left behind a shelf of scholarly works, two families, a black-throated partridge named after him (
Alectoris philbyi
), and an enduring trail of notoriety.
The relationship between father and son, Elliott reflected, had been ‘a mixture of love and hate’. Philby admired and feared his father, whose domination, he felt, had caused his stammer. Back in the 1930s, he had spied on St John, while reporting to Soviet intelligence that his father was ‘not completely well in the head’. But they had grown closer in later life, particularly after Kim’s move to the Middle East. Philby told Elliott that his father had once advised him: ‘If you feel strongly enough about anything you must have the guts to go through with it no matter what anyone might think.’ Both Philbys had certainly done that. Kim later wrote that had his father lived to learn the truth about him, he would have been ‘thunderstruck, but by no means disapproving’. That verdict is questionable. The elder Philby was a contrarian, a rule-breaker and something of an intellectual thug, but he was no traitor. Even so, he had always supported his son, driven his ambition, and undoubtedly planted the seeds of his sedition.
Kim buried St John Philby with full Islamic rites under his Muslim name, and then disappeared into the bars of Beirut. Elliott noted that Philby ‘went out of circulation for days’. Eleanor was more specific: ‘He drank himself senseless’ and emerged from this ferocious drinking bout a changed man, frailer in both body and spirit. Philby’s mother Dora had always doted on him, while his relationship with St John was often tense; yet St John’s death affected him far more. ‘Kim seemed overwhelmed by his father’s death,’ wrote Richard Beeston. His moorings began to slip.
*
A 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. Born in Rotterdam in 1922, to a Dutch mother and Egyptian-Jewish father, as a teenager he had joined the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands, endured internment, and then fled to London disguised as a monk, where he joined MI6, trained as an interrogator in multiple languages, and changed his name to the more English-sounding George Blake. After the war he was posted to Korea to set up an MI6 intelligence network, but was captured by the advancing North Korean communist forces soon after his arrival, and held in captivity for three years. Finally emerging in 1953, Blake was welcomed back by MI6 as a returning hero and sent to Berlin as a case officer working under Elliott’s friend Peter Lunn, tasked with recruiting Soviet intelligence officers as double agents. With his Egyptian blood and gift for languages, Blake was considered ideal material for a Middle East posting, and in 1960 he was enrolled in the Middle Eastern Centre for Arabic Studies, the language school in the hills outside Beirut, run by the Foreign Office. The centre offered intensive, eighteen-month courses in Arabic for diplomats, international businessmen, graduates and intelligence officers. The Lebanese regarded it as a spy school. With his sterling war record and his experience as a prisoner in North Korea, Blake was a minor celebrity in intelligence circles, and when the handsome young MI6 officer arrived in Beirut with his two sons and a pregnant wife, he was eagerly embraced by Anglo-American spy society.
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.
Blake had been ‘turned’ during his North Korean captivity. In detention, he had read the works of Karl Marx and found what he thought was truth. But ‘it was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses’ that triggered his whole-hearted conversion to communism: ‘I felt I was on the wrong side.’ British snobbery and prejudice may have played a part in his embrace of revolution, for, as a foreign-born Jew, Blake was never fully admitted to the MI6 club. ‘He doesn’t belong in the service,’ sniffed one colleague. Blake considered himself a ‘man of no class’, but in the long intelligence tradition, he had wanted to marry his secretary, Iris Peake, the upper-crust daughter of an Old Etonian Conservative MP. The relationship ran aground on the immovable British class system. ‘He was in love with her, but could not possibly marry her because of his circumstances,’ wrote his wife Gillian, who was also in MI6 (along with her father and sister). She believed the break-up had sharpened his resentment of the British establishment. In Berlin, Blake contacted the KGB, under the guise of recruiting spies within the Soviet service, and began passing over reams of top secret and highly damaging information, including details of numerous covert operations such as the Berlin Tunnel, a plot to eavesdrop on the Soviets from underground. At night he copied out Peter Lunn’s index cards, listing and identifying every MI6 spy in Germany. Blake betrayed an estimated 400 agents, sending an untold number to their deaths. Soon after his arrival in Beirut, Blake established contact with Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin, the KGB head of station, who gave him a telephone number to call in case of an emergency – a moment which was, though neither knew it, imminent.
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. In the 1950s, he passed Polish secrets to the Soviets. Then in 1959, he began anonymously passing Polish and Soviet secrets to the CIA, which passed them on to MI6. Goleniewski was a fantasist (he would later claim to be the Tsarevich Alexei of Russia), but some of his intelligence was first-rate, including the revelation that a Soviet spy codenamed ‘Lambda’ was operating within British intelligence. And he had proof: copies of three MI6 documents that this spy had handed to his Soviet handlers. MI6 worked out that only ten people, in Warsaw and Berlin, could have had access to all three pieces of paper: one of them was George Blake. By the spring of 1961, MI6 was ‘ninety per cent sure’ that Blake was ‘Lambda’. Dick White sent a cable to Elliott, instructing him that Blake should be lured ‘to London immediately, on the pretext of discussing a future posting’. For once, Elliott did not tell his friend Kim Philby what was going on. The trap for George Blake was baited and set for Saturday 25 March.
A direct summons to London would have alerted Blake to the danger. Instead, Elliott contrived a chance meeting. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Elliott’s secretary called on the Blakes and told them that she had a spare ticket to an amateur production of
Charley’s Aunt
. Blake’s wife was busy looking after a sick child, and the secretary wondered ‘whether Blake would like to accompany her’. Blake reluctantly agreed to take a break from his studies and spend a few hours watching British people performing this most English of plays. During the interval, Blake and the secretary repaired to the bar with the other thirsty ex-pats, and found Elliott and Elizabeth. ‘In the course of conversation, Elliott drew me aside and said he was glad I happened to be there as this had saved him a trip up the mountain to see me. He had received a letter from Head Office with instructions for me to return to London for a few days’ consultation in connection with a new appointment. It suggested that I should travel on Easter Monday so as to be available in London on Tuesday morning.’
The encounter was staged to allay suspicion: an unplanned meeting at a bar, not a directive; a leisurely letter, not an urgent telegram; a suggestion of when he might like to come to London, not an order. Yet Blake was alarmed. He was in the middle of his language course (for which MI6 was paying) and about to sit some important exams. He would be returning to London on holiday in July. What was the urgency? Blake called the emergency number Nedosekin had given him. They met later that evening on a beach near Beirut. Nedosekin said he would consult Moscow Centre: Blake held a valid Syrian visa, and if necessary he could be across the border in a few hours, and then whisked to Moscow. But when they met again the next day, Nedosekin was reassuring: ‘Moscow saw no cause for concern. The KGB’s enquiries had failed to reveal a leak: Blake should return to London, as requested.’
Before heading to England, Blake paid a last visit to Elliott, to say goodbye and collect some money for his airfare. Elliott was as jovial as ever, but as Blake was leaving, the MI6 station chief asked him whether he would like to be booked into St Ermin’s Hotel, on Caxton Street, just a few yards from MI6 headquarters, for the duration of his London visit. (St Ermin’s is the spy hotel: it was where Krivitsky was debriefed and Philby was recruited, bristling with intelligence officers, and probably the easiest place in London to keep tabs on a suspected traitor.) Blake politely declined, explaining that he planned to stay with his mother in Radlett, north of London. Elliott pressed the point, insisting it ‘would be more convenient to stay at the hotel’. Why was Elliott so insistent he should stay there, rather than with his mother in rural Hertfordshire? ‘For a moment a shadow of a doubt passed my mind but it passed away again,’ Blake wrote. Elliott was probably just being helpful.
Dick White had seen Philby slip through his fingers in 1951; a decade later, he was not going to make the same mistake with Blake. On arriving in London, Blake was escorted to the MI6 house in Carlton Gardens, ushered into an upstairs room (which was bugged), and told that ‘a few matters had cropped up about his time in Berlin that needed to be ironed out’. Elliott had told him he was coming back to discuss a future appointment; there had been no mention of the past. Blake now realised, with grim certainty, what was at hand: ‘I was in deep trouble.’ On the first day of interrogation, he stonewalled, as a trio of MI6 officers chipped away at his explanations; on the second, as the pressure mounted and he was shown evidence of his own espionage, he began to wobble. ‘It wasn’t hostile, but it was persistent.’ Blake was now in no doubt that MI6 knew he was guilty. On day three, one of the interrogators remarked, in a friendly manner, that Blake must have been tortured by the North Koreans into confessing he was a British intelligence officer, and then blackmailed into working as a communist spy. It was all perfectly understandable.