A Spy Among Friends (38 page)

Philby said nothing, and Elliott’s voice hardened as he continued. If Kim refused to play ball, if he persisted in denying the truth, he would be left in the cold. His passport would be withdrawn, and his residence permit revoked. He would not even be able to open a bank account. He would never work for another British newspaper, let alone MI6. His children would be removed from their expensive schools. He would live the rest of his life as a penniless pariah, a ‘leper’ in Elliott’s words. The choice was stark: a gentleman’s agreement, safety in return for a full confession; or he could stand by his denials, and ‘his life would be rendered intolerable’. There was, of course, a third option, so obvious to both men that Elliott had no need to mention it. Philby could cut and run.

Philby was now on his feet, and making for the door. The tea party was over.

‘If you cooperate, we will give you immunity from prosecution. Nothing will be published.’

The door was now open.

‘You’ve been a lucky chap so far, Kim. You have exactly twenty-four hours. Be back here at precisely 4 p.m. tomorrow. If you’re as intelligent as I think you are, you’ll accept.’

Philby’s reply, if he made one, was not picked up by the hidden microphone.

‘I’m offering you a lifeline, Kim . . .’

The door closed behind him.

_*

Philby’s parting silence was itself an admission. ‘He never once asked what the new evidence was.’ He was no longer protesting. He would seize the lifeline. ‘Kim’s broken,’ Elliott told Lunn. ‘Everything’s OK,’ and that evening, he dashed off a reassuring telegram to Dick White in London. Inside, however, he was deeply anxious. Would Philby come back? Would he cooperate, clam up, or try to escape? ‘The next twenty-four hours were a testing time.’

The next day, on the stroke of four, Philby reappeared at the apartment. He seemed sober and composed.

‘OK, here’s the scoop,’ he said. ‘But first you owe me a drink. I haven’t had one since my birthday on New Year’s Day.’

Elliott poured two large brandies.

Philby then launched into a prepared speech, a peculiar confection of truth, half-truth and lies. He said that he had been recruited into the Soviet secret service by his first wife, Litzi (which was not exactly true), and that he had, in turn, recruited Maclean and Burgess (which was). From his pocket he drew two sheets of paper, on which he had typed a sanitised, incomplete account of his work for Moscow, with few details and fewer names. He admitted he had been recruited by the Soviet intelligence service in 1934, but claimed that he had stopped working for Moscow immediately after the war, having ‘seen the error of his ways’. Yes, he had tipped off Maclean in 1951, but merely as an act of loyalty to a friend, not as one active spy protecting another. He listed his early KGB handlers, but made no mention of the Soviet intelligence officers he had dealt with in Istanbul, Washington, London and Beirut.

‘Is Nedosekin your contact?’ asked Elliott, referring to the KGB station chief who had handled George Blake before his capture and arrest.

‘I’ve got no bloody contact,’ lied Philby, with a show of irritation. ‘I broke contact with the KGB.’

Elliott knew Philby was withholding. The two-page summary was a ‘very bland document’ that admitted spying within a narrow timeframe. It was, Elliott knew, a ‘limited confession’, but it was nonetheless a signed admission of guilt, admissible in a court of law, and a document that transformed the game. Philby had acknowledged being a Soviet spy, and more disclosures would surely follow. By implication he had accepted the deal in principle, and a negotiation was under way: his liberty in exchange for information. MI6 now held a signed confession, however partial. He would never be able to row back from here. Elliott had the upper hand.

But what was Philby up to? The question is hard to answer, because Philby himself never told the whole truth about his own intentions. He would later claim he had been merely playing for time, toying with Elliott, controlling the situation with ‘just a little stalling, just a little drinking’, while he made his plans. His behaviour suggests otherwise. Philby was in turmoil, trapped, tempted by Elliott’s offer, and acutely conscious that his future depended on how he played the game. How much could he get away with concealing? Would MI6 honour the deal? If he said too much, would he end up hanging himself? Was Elliott his friend still, or his nemesis?

Elliott demanded answers. With Philby’s confession in hand, he began to increase the pressure. ‘Our promise of immunity and pardon depends wholly on whether you give us all the information that you have. First of all we need information on people who worked with Moscow. By the way, we know them.’ This was partly bluff, of course, but Philby could not know that. How much did Elliott know? Had Anthony Blunt cracked? Was he deploying the old interrogator’s trick, by asking questions to which he already had answers? For two hours they drank and duelled, until the sun was setting and the sound of the muezzin drifted over Beirut. In the language of the sport they both loved, Elliott bowled and Philby batted, padding up, stonewalling, leaving the ball, trying to stay at the crease and knowing that the next delivery could end his long, long innings. Listening to the tape recording many months later, Peter Wright heard Elliott ‘trying his manful best to corner a man for whom deception had been a second skin for thirty years’. The game was finely balanced, a brutal fight to the death conducted in tones of perfect English civility played out to a gently drunken tempo. ‘By the end, they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public school accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century.’

Rising to leave, Philby suggested dinner at his flat that evening. Eleanor knew Elliott was in Beirut, and if he failed to pay a visit she would wonder why. Elliott agreed to come after he had sent another report to Dick White in London. White’s response was encouraging; Philby was ‘finally broken’, and Elliott should continue the interrogation. When Elliott arrived at the Rue Kantari a few hours later, he found Philby passed out on the floor, having consumed an entire bottle of whisky. Not for the first time, Elliott and Eleanor carried him to bed. They chatted for a while afterwards. Elliott did his best to act normally, but Eleanor was no fool. Why, she asked, was he staying in an ‘obscure hotel’? Elliott replied that ‘he did not want too many people to know he was around’. Eleanor had come to like Elliott, and ‘this furtiveness was not characteristic’.

Elliott called the next morning, and invited the Philbys to dinner at Chez Temporel, one of Beirut’s most fashionable and expensive restaurants. He would be bringing his former secretary to make up a foursome. The charade of normality would be maintained. Elliott chose a quiet, candlelit corner table. The food was good – steak
au poivre vert
and Syrian truffle salad – the view through the white arches over the sea was enchanting, and the conversation unmemorable. Both Philby and Elliott tried to act ‘as if nothing had intervened to destroy an old and treasured friendship’. It was almost like old times. Yet Eleanor was uneasy. Kim was visibly anxious, and Elliott’s behaviour was distinctly odd.

His greatest passion was telling naughty stories. He always had one up his sleeve. This was the way he loosened up at parties. But behind the jokes was a keen professional mind. As usual one doubtful joke followed another, but I had a clear feeling the gaiety was false. Something was going on between them that was escaping me . . . Here was a man, a very old friend from Kim’s past, whom I thought I could confide in. Kim got up to go to the lavatory, and I was on the verge of saying to Elliott: ‘Something is worrying Kim terribly. What the hell is going on?’

But before she could do so, Elliott also excused himself, and followed Philby into the restaurant toilets. Over the urinals, Philby handed over a sheaf of typewritten pages, perhaps eight or nine in all, the second instalment of his confession, and much fuller than the first. Philby was producing the goods.

The following day, Philby and Elliott met once more. This time, Elliott brought his own paperwork: a single sheet of paper on which was written a list of names, perhaps a dozen in all. Elliott passed it over. Which of these individuals were Soviet spies? Two of those named were Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, the Fourth and Fifth Men in the Cambridge network; both had been under investigation ever since the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Another on the list was Tim Milne (Philby’s old school friend and the witness at his wedding to Eleanor) who was now an MI6 officer in the Far East. The other names are unknown, but Philby’s friend Tomás Harris was surely on the list, along with Guy Liddell, who had left MI5 under a cloud because of his association with Burgess and Blunt.

Elliott was fishing: naming everybody he could think of who might have been in league with Philby, Burgess and Maclean. As Philby later noted, the list included ‘several names which alarmed me’, and his instinctive response was to mislead, to muddy the waters, to present black as white, or grey. According to Philby: ‘Blunt was in the clear but Tim Milne, who had loyally defended him for years, was not.’ Milne, of course, was entirely innocent and Blunt, entirely guilty. Elliott pressed him for more names, but Philby ‘claimed to know nothing’ about any other spies in the UK, and repeatedly insisted he had not been in contact with Soviet intelligence for fourteen years.

The exchange threw Philby’s predicament into sharp relief. MI6 would continue to squeeze him until every ounce of information had been extracted. He could never hope to hold them off with a partial confession. Blunt might already have admitted his guilt, in which case Elliott would know Philby’s insistence on his innocence was another lie. This time MI6 would not let up. Elliott had told him ‘the debriefing would be a long affair’, with the clear implication that Philby should expect to be wrung dry, forced into revealing everything he ‘knew about the KGB and naming names in Britain’. Whether he returned to London or stayed in Beirut, he would effectively be a prisoner of MI6; if he ever refused to cooperate, or was found to be lying, then the confession he had already signed could be used against him. ‘It became clear to me that my immunity could be withdrawn at any time,’ he later wrote. Elliott had told Philby that his signed confession ‘might stand him in good stead’ with the authorities in London; in fact, it gave Elliott the hold he needed. The ‘lifeline’ offered by Elliott was effectively a noose; the man who had been Philby’s protector for so long would now be his jailer. Philby’s options were running out, and both of them knew it.

The confrontation had lasted four days. Elliott told Philby that he would be leaving Beirut the next day, and travelling on to the Congo. Peter Lunn would take over the debriefing process in Beirut; London would send more questions; the Americans would want to talk to him; the process of interrogation was only just beginning. Back in London, the mood was jubilant. Dick White was ‘effusive in his gratitude’ to Elliott, convinced that Philby was playing ball. ‘He could have rejected the offer of immunity,’ White said. ‘But since he has accepted, he’ll stay and cooperate.’ The head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, decided to bring the FBI into the picture and wrote a soothing memo to J. Edgar Hoover:

In our judgement [Philby’s] statement of the association with the RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] is substantially true. It accords with all the available evidence in our possession and we have no evidence pointing to a continuation of his activities on behalf of the RIS after 1946, save in the isolated instance of Maclean. If this is so, it follows that damage to United States interests will have been confined to the period of the Second World War.

The chief FBI officer in London was invited to draw up a list of questions that Lunn should ask Philby when the debriefing resumed. ‘What makes you think he will still be there?’ the officer asked. ‘He will be,’ he was told. ‘He isn’t going anywhere.’ The CIA was not informed of developments in the Philby case. There would be plenty of time to fill in James Angleton later. As Elliott prepared to leave Beirut and hand over to Lunn, he reported that Philby was still unpredictable, in a nervous, drunken and depressed state: ‘He might, I suppose, commit suicide,’ he warned. Elliott no longer cared if his former friend lived or died. That, at least, was the impression he gave.

Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott shook hands and parted with one last display of their old amity. Ostensibly, they were back on the same side, working together after an unpleasant interlude, and friends once more. Both knew this was untrue.

Elliott’s decision to fly to Africa, leaving Philby unguarded in Beirut, was later condemned as a critical mistake, an act of egregious complacency that enabled Philby to pull off one last espionage coup. That is certainly how Philby and his KGB handlers chose to portray the ensuing events. But there is another, very different way to read Elliott’s actions. The prospect of prosecuting Philby in Britain was anathema to the intelligence services: another trial, so soon after the Blake fiasco, would be politically damaging and profoundly embarrassing. Blake was foreign and flaky, whereas Philby was an insider and, until very recently, a paid MI6 agent. He had already demonstrated his skill at handling the press. He knew far too much. Elliott was emphatic: ‘Nobody wanted him in London’. But keeping him in Beirut indefinitely was almost equally unpalatable. Once Philby was fully interrogated, what would be done with him? He plainly could no longer work for British newspapers, so would MI6 have to continue paying him? The prospect of subsidising a known traitor to prop up the bar of the Normandie Hotel did not appeal.