Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Elliott later claimed that the idea Philby might defect to the USSR had never occurred to him, or anyone else: ‘It just didn’t dawn on us.’ This defies belief. Burgess and Maclean had both defected; Blake would escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and make his way to Moscow. Elliott must have suspected that Philby would have a back-up escape plan. Moreover, he had deliberately forced him into a corner: Philby knew he now faced sustained interrogation, over a long period, at the hands of Peter Lunn, a man he found ‘unsympathetic’. Elliott had made it quite clear that if he failed to cooperate fully, the immunity deal was off and the confession he had already signed would be used against him. Burgess and Maclean had vanished into the Soviet Union, and were barely heard of again. Allowing Philby to join his friends in Moscow – to ‘do a fade’, in intelligence jargon – might be the tidiest solution all round.
Elliott could not have made it easier for Philby to flee, whether intentionally or otherwise. In defiance of every rule of intelligence, he left Beirut without making any provision for monitoring a man who had just confessed to being a double agent: Philby was not followed or watched; his flat was not placed under surveillance; his phone was not tapped; and MI6’s allies in the Lebanese security service were not alerted. He was left to his own devices, and told that Peter Lunn would be in touch in due course. Elliott simply walked away from Beirut, and left the door to Moscow wide open.
That was either monumentally stupid, or exceptionally clever.
The very next evening, on the stroke of six o’clock, Philby stood on the balcony of his flat on Rue Kantari, with a book in his hand.
19
Philby and Petukhov met a few hours later in Vrej, the backstreet Armenian restaurant. It took Philby only a few rushed minutes to explain the situation: MI6 had new and damning information, from Golitsyn, and had offered him immunity in exchange for information. He did not tell his KGB handler that he had already confessed; instead, he allowed Petukhov to believe that he was holding out under questioning (as he had so often before) but would soon face another round of interrogation. Petukhov hurried back to the Soviet embassy and sent a cable to Vassili Dozhdalev, the head of the British desk at Moscow Centre, requesting instructions. Dozhdalev asked whether Philby could withstand another cross-examination. ‘Philby does not think he can escape again,’ Petukhov told him. Dozhdalev gave the order: Philby should be extracted from Beirut as soon as possible.
‘Your time has come,’ Petukhov told Philby, at another hurriedly arranged meeting. ‘They won’t leave you alone now. You have to disappear. There’s no other way. There’s room for you in Moscow.’ This was probably what Philby had hoped to hear, though he had not yet fully made up his mind to flee. Elliott’s words, he later hinted, ‘had planted doubts in me and made me think about arguments he had used.’ He had mentally rehearsed the drama of defection many times, but still he hesitated.
‘Arrangements will take some time,’ said Petukhov. But when the time came, Philby would have to move swiftly. As before, Petukhov would walk past the Rue Kantari flat at pre-arranged times: ‘If you see me carrying a newspaper, that means I have to meet you. If I’m carrying a book, that means everything is prepared for your departure, and you have to get moving.’
Philby waited. A few days later, Peter Lunn called the apartment to ask if he was ready to discuss ‘the question that interests us’. Philby said he needed more time. Lunn did not put him under pressure; he did not offer to come to the flat and help to jog Philby’s memory. Instead, he announced he was going skiing. Philby learned from a friend at the embassy that a fresh fall of snow in the mountains had created ideal conditions and Lunn, the Olympic skier, would be gone for the next four days. That, at least, is what Philby was told. But Lunn did not go skiing.
On 23 January 1963, Glen Balfour-Paul, the first secretary at the British embassy, and his wife Marnie threw a dinner party. Several journalists were invited, including Clare Hollingworth of the
Guardian
and Kim Philby of the
Observer
. Philby had ‘proved a helpful and friendly contact’ since Balfour-Paul’s arrival in Beirut two years earlier, and the couples had grown close. Eleanor Philby was looking forward to dinner; for the first time in weeks, Philby had agreed to leave the flat for a social occasion. Glen Balfour-Paul was an expert Arabist, and Eleanor wanted to pick his brains about Middle Eastern archaeology, her new hobby. Marnie’s cook was making sherry trifle.
Philby spent the morning drinking coffee on the balcony, despite the lashing rain. Beirut was braced for one of the winter storms that batter the city with unpredictable ferocity. A figure carrying a book walked slowly past in the wet street without looking up. In the late afternoon, Philby grabbed his raincoat and scarf, and announced he was going to meet a contact but would be home by six, leaving plenty of time to dress for dinner. He was seen at the bar of the St Georges Hotel, apparently deep in thought. After downing several drinks, Philby asked the barman if he could use the telephone. Eleanor was cooking supper for her daughter Annie and Philby’s youngest son Harry, who were staying for the holiday, when the telephone rang. Thirteen-year-old Harry answered it, and shouted to Eleanor in the kitchen: ‘Daddy’s going to be late. He says he’ll meet you at the Balfour-Pauls’ at eight.’
Eight o’clock came and went at the Balfour-Pauls’ with no sign of Kim Philby. Eleanor apologised for her husband’s tardiness, and said she thought he might be sending a story to the
Economist
. By 9.30 what had been a ‘cosy gathering’ was becoming fractious and hungry. Marnie announced that they should eat anyway. The storm outside was building. When the food was cleared away, fresh drinks were served, and Eleanor, now quite drunk, was becoming worried. ‘God, what a horrible night! Perhaps he’s been hit by a car, or stumbled into the sea.’
Marnie tried to reassure her: ‘Don’t be silly, Kim’s obviously been held up.’ Clare Hollingworth noticed that her host, the diplomat Glen Balfour-Paul, ‘had nothing to say about his missing guest’, which struck her as strange.
While the Balfour-Pauls’ guests were eating trifle, a car with diplomatic plates drove towards the harbour in the sheeting rain. In the back sat Philby, with Pavel Nedosekin alongside him; Petukhov sat in front beside the driver. ‘Everything is fine, everything is going the way it should,’ said Nedosekin. Philby wondered, with a flicker of malice, just how much trouble Peter Lunn would get into for his ill-timed skiing break. At that moment a Latvian sailor was getting hopelessly drunk, with the generous encouragement of a Soviet intelligence officer, in one of the harbour bars. The car entered the port, drove along the quay and pulled up alongside the
Dolmatova
, a Soviet freighter taking on cargo and bound for Odessa. The Russian captain shook hands with Philby on the gangplank, and led him to a cabin. A bottle of cognac stood on the table. Philby, his minders and the captain raised their glasses and drank. In a few minutes the bottle was empty. Petukhov handed him an identity card in the name of ‘Villi Maris’, a merchant seaman from Riga. New clothes were laid out on the bed, including warm underwear. It would be cold in Moscow.
Eleanor left the Balfour-Pauls’ dinner party before midnight, and returned home through the rain. There was no sign of her husband at the Rue Kantari, and no message. She was now seriously alarmed. Soon after midnight, she telephoned Peter Lunn at home. Lunn’s wife Antoinette picked up, and explained that Peter was out. She agreed to pass on a message that he should contact Eleanor as soon as possible. In fact, Lunn was already at the British embassy, attending ‘a hastily summoned meeting about Kim’. The speed with which Lunn swung into action that night suggests that he was primed and waiting: perhaps the news of Philby’s failure to appear for dinner reached him from Balfour-Paul, but it is also possible that he was tracking Philby’s movements by other means. Within minutes, Lunn was on the telephone to Eleanor.
‘Would you like me to come round?’ he asked.
‘I would be most grateful,’ she said.
When Lunn duly appeared, Eleanor explained that Philby had left the flat earlier that afternoon, telephoned in the afternoon, and then vanished. Lunn asked if anything was missing, such as clothes, documents or Philby’s typewriter, but all was in place, including his British passport. Lunn surely knew that Philby was doing a ‘fade’, and already on his way to Moscow. The most important Soviet spy in history was on the run. But instead of behaving as one might expect in such a crisis, Lunn was calm; he did not conduct a full search of the flat, alert the Lebanese police, or put a watch on the borders, the ports or the airports. Fearing her husband had suffered some sort of accident, Eleanor wanted to call the hospitals, or search some of his favourite bars, but Lunn was almost nonchalant: ‘His advice was to do nothing until morning.’ Lunn left the flat at around 2 a.m., and immediately telephoned the British ambassador. Then he wrote a twenty-six-paragraph cable to Dick White in London.
Eleanor spent a sleepless night, waiting and wondering, struggling with the ‘terrible fear’ that her life had changed for ever. Before dawn, the
Dolmatova
weighed anchor and headed out to sea. The Russian freighter had obviously departed in haste, because some of her cargo was left lying on the quayside. She also left behind a member of her crew, a very drunk Latvian seaman called Villi Maris who would discover, when he finally woke up, that he had lost both his identity card and his ship. Philby stood at the rail of the
Dolmatova
, wrapped up against the cold in his Westminster scarf, and watched the dawn break over the receding bay, knowing that the ‘last link with England had been severed forever’.
*
Three years after independence, Congo was in turmoil, a Cold War battleground riven by civil war. It was certainly a logical place for Elliott to be. He always claimed he was in Brazzaville, preparing to cross the Congo River, when he received a coded message informing him of Philby’s disappearance, and instructing him to return at once to Beirut. But the speed with which he reappeared in Beirut suggests he may have been somewhere nearer at hand. Elliott concluded at once that ‘Philby had vanished into the blue (or rather the red)’. He found Eleanor close to hysteria, fearing that her husband had been abducted, or worse. Within days, she received a mysterious letter, purporting to come from Philby (several more would follow), hinting that he was on a secret journalistic assignment: ‘Tell my colleagues I’m on a long tour of the area.’ The letter was so peculiar in tone that Eleanor thought it might have been written under duress. Among Beirut’s journalists, it was generally assumed that if Philby was not chasing a story, he must be off on a bender, or bedded down somewhere with a mistress. MI6 knew better. The hasty departure of the
Dolmatova
clearly indicated where Philby had gone, and how. The Russian link was confirmed by the discovery of banknotes in Philby’s safe with serial numbers matching those recently issued to a Soviet diplomat by a Beirut bank.
Elliott did his best to calm Eleanor, without giving away what he knew. ‘There is no question that she was deeply in love with him and had no suspicion that he was a traitor to his country,’ Elliott wrote. Philby had disappeared ‘in circumstances calculated to do her maximum hurt’, but Elliott could not yet bring himself to reveal to Eleanor that Philby was a Soviet spy who had lied to her throughout their marriage, just as he had lied to Aileen throughout his previous marriage, and to Elliott himself throughout their friendship. Yet he hinted at the truth: ‘You do realise that your husband was not an ordinary man?’ he told her. She would find out just how extraordinary soon enough.
A few weeks later, a scruffy stranger knocked on the door of the apartment in the Rue Kantari, thrust an envelope into Eleanor’s hand, and disappeared back down the stairwell. The envelope contained a three-page typewritten letter, signed ‘with love from Kim’, instructing her to buy a plane ticket for London to throw any watchers off the scent, and then secretly go to the Czech airlines office and buy another ticket for Prague. Then she should go to the alleyway opposite the house, leading to the sea, ‘choose a spot high up on the wall, towards the right’ and write, in white chalk, the exact date and time of the flight to Prague. Philby instructed her to burn the letter after reading. Eleanor was deeply suspicious, and distraught, ‘convinced that Kim had been kidnapped’, and that she was being lured into a trap. In fact, Philby’s plan to get Eleanor to join him was genuine, if unworkable: the press had by now picked up the story of his mysterious disappearance, her movements were being watched, and the idea that Eleanor could blithely walk onto a plane and fly to Czechoslovakia was ludicrously impractical. After some indecision, she told Elliott about the letter, who instructed her ‘on no account to meet any strangers outside the house’. Elliott then crept up the alleyway and chalked a date and flight time on the wall, ‘to test the system and cause confusion in the enemy ranks’. It was the first thrust in a peculiar duel across the Iron Curtain.
The news of Philby’s defection tore like brushfire through the intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic, provoking shock, embarrassment and furious recrimination. Philby’s defenders in MI6 were stunned, and his detractors in MI5 enraged that he had been allowed to escape. In the CIA there was baffled dismay at what was seen as yet another British intelligence disaster. Hoover was livid. ‘Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard,’ wrote one MI5 officer. ‘To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed away, and the dark ages began.’ Arthur Martin, the officer originally slated to confront Philby in Beirut, was apoplectic: ‘We should have sent a team out there and grilled him while we had the chance.’ The belief that Philby must have been tipped off by another Soviet spy within British intelligence took root within MI5, prompting a mole-hunt that would continue for years, sowing paranoia and distrust into every corner of the organisation. Even Elliott came under investigation. Arthur Martin was detailed to grill him: ‘But after lengthy interrogation Elliott just convinced his interrogator that he was in the clear.’