Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Then Blake snapped: ‘No, nobody tortured me! No, nobody blackmailed me! I myself approached the Soviets and offered my services to them of my own accord.’
Blake’s pride could simply not allow him to accept the suggestion that he was spying for anything other than the most lofty ideological motives. Perhaps the same tactic might have flushed out Philby a decade earlier; then again, Blake lacked Philby’s innate duality. ‘The game was up,’ he wrote. Over the ensuing days, his confession tumbled out, in a cathartic affirmation of his own guilt, delivered with some pride. But if Blake imagined that candour would win him clemency, he was mistaken. The British authorities hit him with ‘the biggest hammer possible’.
The Blake case was the worst spy scandal since the defection of Burgess and Maclean, and in terms of raw intelligence losses, far more damaging. Blake had exposed scores of agents, though he would always maintain, implausibly, that there was no blood on his hands. He was charged under the Official Secrets Act, remanded in custody at a closed hearing, and incarcerated in Brixton Prison to await trial. A telegram flew around the world, in two sections, to every MI6 station: the first part read: ‘The following name is a traitor’; the second, when decoded, spelled out the letters G-E-O-R-G-E-B-L-A-K-E.
The discovery of another spy in MI6 provoked a mixed reaction in the US. For some CIA veterans (including Bill Harvey, Philby’s first and most vehement accuser) it was yet more evidence of British incompetence and treachery, but James Angleton was reassuring, telling Dick White: ‘It can happen to anyone.’
The news of Blake’s arrest and impending trial caused consternation in Beirut’s intelligence community; no one was more genuinely shocked and alarmed than Kim Philby. In accordance with established intelligence rules, the KGB had maintained total separation between the Blake and Philby cases. The two spies had never met, and Blake had been recruited quite independently of the Cambridge network. But Blake’s capture suggested, rightly, that MI6 must have new sources within Soviet intelligence, and if one mole had been dug out, then Philby might well be next.
Less than a month after confessing, Blake was in the dock at the Old Bailey. The maximum penalty for violation of the Official Secrets Act was fourteen years. The prosecutors, however, brought five separate charges against him, relating to five distinct time periods. The verdict was never in doubt, but the sentence drew gasps from the court. ‘Your case is one of the worst that can be envisaged,’ the judge declared, and then handed down fourteen-year jail terms for each of the charges; he further ordered that three of the terms should run consecutively – a total of forty-two years’ imprisonment. The conviction was front-page news in every newspaper. It was the longest prison sentence ever handed down by a British court. Reporters suggested, fancifully, that Blake had been given a year for every agent he had betrayed and killed. By that arithmetic, he would have been sentenced to some four centuries behind bars.
The news of Blake’s harsh sentence left Philby stunned. He had spied for longer than Blake, at a far higher level, and at greater human cost. In the 1950s the government had quailed at the prospect of a public trial for espionage; now the authorities seemed prepared to prosecute, and ruthlessly. If Philby were to be caught, tried and convicted in the same way as Blake, he would never get out of prison. For perhaps the first time, Philby realised the full extent of the peril he was in.
The journalist Richard Beeston visited Philby a few days later, to see what he made of the Blake story.
I went round to his flat late in the morning to find it in chaos after a party with furniture overturned and bottles and glasses everywhere. Kim was looking terrible, nursing a hangover which made him even more incoherent. ‘Never met Blake, never even heard of the chap until I read of his arrest,’ Kim told me . . . Kim’s appearance had strikingly deteriorated since I had last seen him. And there is little doubt that Blake’s arrest and his savage forty-two-year prison sentence precipitated Kim’s further decline.
For decades, Philby had drunk heavily, but never uncontrollably; henceforth, he became volatile and unpredictable. As an evening progressed, ‘Kim would become insulting, abusive, make lunges at women and not infrequently goose the hostess.’ Even Eleanor, a prodigious boozer herself, noticed that her husband was ‘not light-hearted about drink any longer’. They argued publicly, and sometimes fought physically: one dinner party ended with the Philbys hurling mantelpiece ornaments at each other, while their appalled hosts looked on. Once a voluble drunk, he now drank himself incoherent, then silent, and finally unconscious. Parties ended with Philby slumped insensible on a sofa, or even under a blanket on the floor while the party continued around him. After sobering up, he would send a charming note of apology, and frequently flowers. ‘By the next day he was usually forgiven.’
Philby had always prided himself on maintaining his spycraft no matter how much alcohol he consumed. Now he began to make mistakes. A first rule of espionage is to avoid consistency of behaviour, but friends noticed that Philby was frequently absent on Wednesday nights. One teased him: ‘I know all about your Wednesday nights.’ Philby looked aghast. Wednesday was his night for meeting Petukhov. He dropped remarks, suggestive of a man in fear. One night at Joe’s bar, Moyra Beeston asked Philby, half in jest, if he really was the ‘Third Man’. Instead of denying it, or even replying directly, he seized her by the wrist so hard he left a bruise. ‘You know Moyra, I always believe that loyalty to your friends is more important than anything else’ – a self-revealing remark for a man who had repeatedly betrayed his own friends, in obedience to what he claimed was a higher loyalty. ‘What would you do if you knew something awful was going to happen to a friend and only you could do something about it?’ he asked her. He was plainly referring to his own decision to tip off Maclean so many years earlier, but also to his current predicament, as he awaited ‘something awful’.
In late August 1962, Kim and Eleanor headed to Jordan for a long-planned family holiday. A few days before they were due to come home, Philby announced that he had to return to Beirut at once, offering no explanation for his sudden departure. When Eleanor got back to the flat, she found the lights off, and Philby sitting in the dark on the terrace, sodden with drink and inconsolable with grief.
‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’
‘Jackie’s dead,’ said Philby.
The pet fox had fallen from the balcony, dropping five floors to the street below. Eleanor suspected that the Lebanese maid, who had long disapproved of keeping a smelly wild animal in a city flat, had pushed the fox over the parapet.
‘Kim seemed to give himself up to grief,’ wrote Eleanor, who thought his mourning for the pet, while understandable, ‘seemed out of all proportion’. Nicholas Elliott, too, was surprised and worried that Philby seemed ‘shattered’ by the death of the fox, anguished and tearful: ‘Apart from when his father died, this was the only occasion, in all the times I spent with Philby, that I knew him to display visible emotion.’ Philby was cracking up, partly through grief, and partly through fear.
*
In Helsinki some seven months earlier, a short, stout Russian wrapped in a fur coat had knocked on the door of Frank Freiberg, the CIA representative in Finland, and announced, in very bad English, that he wanted to defect to the West. Major Anatoly Golitsyn of the KGB had been planning his move for some time. As a senior officer in the KGB’s strategic planning department and a fifteen-year veteran of Soviet intelligence, he had accumulated a vast trove of secrets, most of them memorised, or half-memorised, or almost-remembered. For the problem with Golitsyn was that while he knew a great deal about some aspects of Soviet intelligence, he also knew a little about a lot. Much of the information he carried, in his head and in the package of documents he had hidden in the snow before knocking on Freiberg’s door, was reliable and accurate; but much was fragmentary, and some was wrong. Golitsyn was whisked to the US, to begin a debriefing process that would continue for many years.
James Angleton was delighted, insisting that Golitsyn was ‘the most valuable defector ever to reach the West’. Others considered him unreliable. Some thought he was a fruitcake. In the spring of 1962, the CIA allowed Golitsyn to travel to London to be interviewed by British intelligence. There Golitsyn described how, in Moscow, he had heard tell of a ‘very important spy network in the United Kingdom called the Ring of Five’, a quintet of British spies who had met at university and over many years had furnished Soviet intelligence with the most valuable information. Although Golitsyn could not identify Philby by name, or even codename, that information alone was enough to revive the long-dormant investigation, and put MI5’s mole-hunters firmly back on Philby’s trail.
The defection sent shockwaves through the KGB. Some fifty-four KGB stations around the world were instructed to report whatever Golitsyn might know about their operations. Meetings with important KGB agents were suspended, and plans were approved for the assassination, at the earliest opportunity, of Anatoly Golitsyn.
Yuri Modin had left Britain in 1958. But in the summer of 1962, according to CIA records, he travelled to the Middle East, via Pakistan. Not until much later did MI5 investigators work out that Modin’s trip coincided with the moment that Philby had suddenly returned early from the family holiday in Jordan, from which point on he had ‘exhibited increasing signs of alcoholism and stress’. MI5 concluded that ‘Modin had gone to Beirut to alert Philby’, and tell him that another, well-informed, defector was spilling secrets. If Modin made contact with Philby in Beirut, the location has never been revealed. He later described the once-irrepressible Agent Stanley as ‘a shadow of his former self’. The purpose of his visit was clear: ‘To warn Philby not to return to Britain because of the danger of arrest, and to make contingency plans for his escape.’ The warning, however, seems to have sent Philby into a tailspin of fear. When Eleanor found Philby sitting in the dark, his tears were not only for his dead fox.
In October 1962, Nicholas Elliott was offered a new post, as the MI6 director for Africa, based in London. It was another major promotion, covering another important Cold War arena. His two years in the Lebanon had been fascinating, fruitful and fun, with plenty of the ‘belly laughs’ for which Elliott lived. He would be leaving Beirut with regrets, not least over Philby’s deteriorated state. Peter Lunn, his predecessor in Vienna, would replace him as MI6 station chief. Before heading to Beirut to take over from Elliott, Lunn asked Dick White what, if anything, he should do about Kim Philby. White was aware that Philby was back in MI5’s sights. ‘Of course he’s a traitor,’ he snapped. ‘Just keep an eye on him. Let’s wait and see what happens.’
Philby was also waiting, with dread. Bereaved, under threat of exposure, alarmed by the shocking example made of Blake, and now deprived of the companionship and immediate support of the one person who had always defended him, Philby sank ever deeper into the whisky bottle.
The denouement came not by way of new information from a fresh defector, as Philby feared, but through an old friend, recalling a thirty-year-old conversation he had long forgotten.
17
Flora Solomon had lived a life that stretched, rather bizarrely, from the Russian Revolution to the British High Street: after an early affair with a Bolshevik revolutionary and marriage to a British soldier, she had been widowed young, raised her son Peter alone (who by 1961 had founded Amnesty International) and then created the welfare department at Marks and Spencer. A pillar of Anglo-Jewish society, she continued to hold regular salons in her Mayfair home, just as she had in the 1930s. Solomon remained Russian in accent, British in manner, and a committed Zionist in her politics. ‘Russian soul, Jewish heart, British passport’ was how she described herself. By 1962, her main passion in life was the state of Israel, which she defended and supported, in word, deed and funds, at every opportunity.
It was Flora Solomon’s commitment to Israel that brought Kim Philby back into her life. Every week, she read the
Observer
, paying particular attention to coverage of the Middle East, and found herself becoming increasingly irritated by Philby’s articles. ‘To anyone with eyes to see they were permeated with anti-Israel bias. They accepted the Soviet view of Middle East politics,’ she wrote. In the simplistic divisions imposed by the Cold War, while Israel was supported by Washington, Moscow curried favour among the Arab states, and in Solomon’s subjective opinion, Philby was churning out Soviet propaganda designed to weaken her beloved Israel. (This was not actually true: Philby was instinctively pro-Arab, but he was far too canny to reveal any overt pro-Soviet bias in his journalism.) During the 1950s she had assumed that the accusations against Philby were merely McCarthyite smears. Now she was not so sure. She remembered his remarks about ‘the cause’ back in 1935, and the rather clumsy attempt to recruit her. ‘The thought occurred to me that Philby had, after all, remained a communist, notwithstanding his clearance by MI5 of possible complicity in the Burgess-Maclean scandal.’
In August 1962, Flora Solomon visited Israel, as she had done many times before, to attend a conference at the Chaim Weizmann Institute, the science research centre in Rehovot founded by Israel’s first President and endowed by Baron Sieff, the chairman of Marks and Spencer. At a party in Weizmann’s home, she encountered Victor, Lord Rothschild, another patron of the institute. A distinguished scientist himself, Rothschild had headed MI5’s sabotage and explosives section during the war and won the George Medal for ‘dangerous work in hazardous circumstances’. A regular at the Harris soirées and a Cambridge contemporary of Burgess and Blunt, Rothschild would later be accused, quite unfairly, of being a Soviet spy himself. In fact, though a left-winger in his youth, like Flora Solomon he had no truck with communism, and retained close links with MI5. Rothschild and Solomon had known each other since the 1930s, and their conversation naturally drifted towards their mutual acquaintance, Kim Philby.