Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Under Cowgill’s relaxed regime, the officers of Section V could visit London ‘virtually at will’. Philby and Elliott seized every opportunity to do so, in order to cultivate ‘contacts with other SIS sections, with MI5 and with other government departments’, while also visiting their clubs and, in the summer, watching the cricket together at Lord’s. Both volunteered for ‘fire-watching nights’, once or twice a month, at MI6 headquarters, monitoring the telegrams that came in overnight from around the world, which offered a fascinating insight into British intelligence operations. Within the secret brethren, Elliott and Philby were the closest of siblings, revelling in the shared risks, hard work and ribaldry.
One morning in 1941, Kim Philby caught the train to London, taking with him, as usual, a ‘bulging briefcase and a long visiting list’. He also carried a detailed description of the workings of Section V, its personnel, aims, operations, failures and successes, written out in ‘longhand, in neat, tiny writing’. After completing his round of meetings at MI5 and MI6, Philby did not head to the bar beneath MI6, nor to his club; nor to the Harris home for an evening of drinking and secret-sharing. Instead he descended into the St James’s Park Underground station. He let the first train leave without boarding. Then he waited until every other passenger had boarded the next train, before slipping on just as the doors closed. Two stops later, he alighted and caught a train in the opposite direction. Then he hopped on a moving bus. Finally certain that he was not being followed (‘dry-cleaned’, in spy jargon), Philby made his way to a park, where a stocky, fair-haired man was waiting for him on a bench. They shook hands; Philby handed over the contents of his briefcase, and then headed to King’s Cross to catch the train home to St Albans.
Had Nick Elliott examined the report about Section V written by his best friend, he would have been amazed, and then mortified. One passage read: ‘MR NICHOLAS ELLIOTT. 24, 5ft 9in. Brown hair, prominent lips, black glasses, ugly and rather pig-like to look at. Good brain, good sense of humour. Likes a drink but was recently very ill and now, as a consequence, drinks little. He is in charge of Holland . . .’
Elliott would have been still more astonished to discover that the man hurrying away into the night with the bundle of papers was an officer of the NKVD, Stalin’s intelligence agency, and that his friend Kim Philby was an experienced Soviet spy of eight years’ standing, codenamed ‘Sonny’.
3
Philby’s father nicknamed his son Kim after the eponymous hero in the popular Rudyard Kipling novel. Brought up by an Indian nanny, Philby’s first language was a sort of nursery Punjabi; like Kipling’s Kim, he was a white child who could pass for an Indian. The name stuck forever, but its aptness would not emerge for years. The fictional Kim has two distinct personalities; he is a two-sided man.
Something I owe to the soil that grew
More to the life that fed,
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.
The soil that grew Kim Philby had produced a conventional upper-class, public school-educated Englishman; the life that fed him had created something entirely different, and it was a life that his dear friend Nicholas Elliott knew nothing about. He did not know that Philby had become a Soviet agent in the very year that Elliott had gone up to Cambridge; he did not know that Philby’s idyllic marriage was a fraud, and that his friend was really married to an Austrian communist spy; he did not know that Philby had joined MI6, not as an eager patriot like himself, but rather, in Philby’s own words, as a ‘penetration agent working in the Soviet interest’. And he did not know that during the convivial Sunday lunches in St Albans, the boozy evenings at the Harris home, the drinks in the basement of MI6 and the bar at White’s, Philby was hard at work, absorbing his friends’ secrets as fast as the gin, and then passing them all to Moscow.
The seeds of Philby’s double life lay in his childhood, his father, his upbringing and the intense ideological conversion that shaped him in early adulthood. Philby maintained that his dual existence emerged from an unwavering belief in a set of political principles that he discovered at the age of eighteen, and never abandoned: what Philby’s enemies described as betrayal, he saw as loyalty. But there was more to Philby than mere ideology. Like many late-Empire products of the establishment, he had an inborn faith in his ability, and right, to change and rule the world. This he shared with Elliott, though their views of how the world should be run could not have been more opposed. Both were imperialists, but for rival empires. Beneath Philby’s golden charm lay a thick substratum of conceit; the charmer invites you into his world, though never too far, and only on his terms. The English love their secrets, the knowledge that they know a little more than the man standing next to them; when that man is also a secret-keeper, its redoubles what Trevor-Roper called ‘the exquisite relish of ruthless, treacherous, private power’. Philby tasted the powerful drug of deception as a youth, and remained addicted to infidelity for the rest of his life.
Kim was his father’s pet, and project. Like Claude Elliott, St John Philby was ambitious for his son, but showed him little affection. He moulded him for Westminster and Cambridge, and was proud when his son achieved those goals; but mostly he was absent, charging around the Arab world courting controversy, and searching for celebrity. ‘My ambition is fame, whatever that may mean,’ he said. St John Philby was a notable scholar, linguist and ornithologist, and he did achieve fame of a sort, but might have found more lasting appreciation had he not been so profoundly irritating, wilful and arrogant. He was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth: he never backed down, or listened, or compromised. He was equally swift to give and take offence, and ferociously critical of everyone except himself. He alternately neglected and hectored his wife Dora. He was snobbish, and in many ways conventional, but also instinctively contrarian, forever bucking the system and then complaining furiously when the system failed to reward him. Kim idolised him, and loathed him.
At school, the young Philby was ‘constantly aware of his father’s long shadow’. Alongside his fine academic record, and general popularity, the boy showed a small streak of mendacity, prompting some parental disquiet: ‘He should always be careful to be truthful whatever the consequences,’ observed his father. Kim arrived at Cambridge at the age of seventeen on a history scholarship, having inherited both his father’s intellectual self-confidence, and his determination to swim against the tide.
The violent ideological currents sweeping Cambridge in the 1930s had created a vortex which quickly swept up Philby and many other clever, angry, alienated young men. He made friends on the political left, and some on the extreme left. Fascism was on the march in Europe, and only communism, it seemed to many, could oppose it. Late at night, over copious drinks, in panelled rooms, students argued, debated, tried on one ideological outfit or another, and, in a small handful of cases, embraced violent revolution. The most significant, and certainly the most colourful, of Philby’s radical new friends was Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, amoral, witty, supremely dangerous and loud in his advocacy of communism. Another was Donald Maclean, a clever young linguist destined for the Foreign Office.
Philby joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society. He canvassed on behalf of the Labour Party. But there was no ‘sudden conversion’, no revolutionary epiphany when the religion of communism seized his soul. Instead, the student Philby moved slowly leftwards, and then faster after visiting Berlin in 1933 and witnessing at first hand, like Elliott, the brutality of Nazism during an anti-Jewish rally. Unlike many of his friends, Philby never joined the Communist Party. His beliefs were radical, but simple: the rich had exploited the poor for too long; the only bulwark against fascism was Soviet communism, ‘the inner fortress of the world movement’; capitalism was doomed and crumbling; the British establishment was poisoned by Nazi leanings. ‘I left the university,’ he wrote, ‘with the conviction that my life must be devoted to communism.’ Yet he wore his convictions so lightly they were all but invisible. With the £14 he was awarded for his degree, he bought the collected works of Karl Marx. But there is no evidence he ever studied them in depth, or even read them. Though politics would dictate his life, he was not greatly interested in political theory. As Elliott later observed, ‘I can hardly see him as a lecturer in dialectical materialism.’
Before leaving Cambridge, Philby sought out his supervisor, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and asked him how best he might ‘devote his life to the communist cause’. It was a measure of how deeply Marxism had penetrated the university that Philby felt no danger in asking such a loaded question, and Dobb had no qualms in answering it. Dobb directed him to Louis Gibarti, a Paris agent of the Comintern, the international communist organisation, who in turn furnished an introduction to the Austrian communist underground. It was that easy: the radical left had its own Old Boy network.
In the autumn of 1933, Philby travelled to Vienna, ostensibly to improve his German before applying to join the Foreign Office – in reality to witness, and if possible take part in, the battle between left and right then under way in the Austrian capital. Engelbert Dollfuss, Austria’s extreme right-wing dictator, had already suspended the constitution and outlawed strikes and demonstrations in his efforts to suppress the socialist movement. A full-scale conflict was imminent, and the situation, as Philby put it, was ‘at a crisis point’. Philby made his way to the address provided by Gibarti, and introduced himself to its occupants, Israel and Gisella Kohlman, and their daughter Alice – with whom he promptly fell in love. Alice, known as Litzi, was twenty-three, dark-haired, Jewish, vivacious, direct to the point of bluntness, and newly divorced, having married at eighteen. When Philby met Litzi, he was still a virgin and a political naif; she swiftly attended to both deficiencies. Litzi was a fully committed revolutionary and, according to one contemporary, a ‘tremendous little sexpot’.
Litzi was active in the Viennese communist underground, and in contact with Soviet intelligence. She had spent two weeks in prison for subversive activities. Philby was instantly besotted. They made love in the snow. (‘Actually quite warm, once you get used to it,’ he recalled to a later girlfriend.) Philby had been in Austria for only a few weeks, when Dollfuss moved to crush the Leftists, arresting socialist leaders, banning trades unions and catapulting Austria into a brief but vicious civil war. Philby and Litzi plunged into the fray on behalf of the Revolutionary Socialists, the short-lived alliance of socialists and communists, passing messages, drafting leaflets, and helping to smuggle wanted men and women out of the country. The left was crushed in four days; 1,500 people were arrested, and the socialist leaders were executed. Litzi was on the wanted list, and the police were closing in, but Philby’s British passport would offer her protection: on 24 February 1934, he married Litzi in Vienna Town Hall. This was more than just a marriage made in Marxism; as Mrs Philby she could flee with her new husband to the safety of Britain. Litzi, or ‘Lizzy’ as he called her, may be the only woman to whom Philby remained both ideologically and sexually faithful. ‘Even though the basis of our relationship was political to some extent, I truly loved her and she loved me.’
A few weeks later, the newlyweds arrived in London, where they lodged with Philby’s mother. Conventional Dora Philby, desperate to keep up appearances despite a perennial shortage of money, was not best pleased to find her son married to a foreign communist. She regarded his politics as another passing adolescent phase, like acne. ‘I do hope Kim gets a job to get him off this bloody communism,’ Mrs Philby wrote to her husband in Saudi Arabia. ‘He’s not quite extreme yet, but may become so.’ St John was unconcerned by his son’s radicalism. ‘Excess can always be toned down afterwards,’ he declared.
Just a few weeks after his return from Vienna, Philby sat on a bench in Regent’s Park, waiting to meet a ‘man of decisive importance’ who, Litzi had promised, would change his life. When Philby had asked her who he was, and what made him so important, she clammed up.
Out of the June sunshine appeared a short, stout man in his early thirties with curly fair hair and intelligent eyes. He spoke English with a strong East European accent, and introduced himself as ‘Otto’. Philby never forgot their first conversation. Otto spoke about art and music, his love of Paris and his dislike of London. This, Philby reflected, was a ‘man of considerable cultural background’. Philby was entranced: ‘He was a marvellous man. Simply marvellous. I felt that immediately. The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment.’ That was a quality many found in Philby too. Gradually, their conversation drifted towards politics, and then the works of Marx and Lenin, which Otto seemed to know by heart. Philby, in turn, described his political experiences in Cambridge, his activities in Vienna, and his wish to join the Communist Party. They spoke in euphemisms, with Otto hinting that he could put ‘important and interesting work’ in Philby’s direction. As with most espionage relationships, this one began not with politics, but with friendship. ‘I trusted him from the start,’ wrote Philby. ‘It was an amazing conversation.’ They agreed to meet again.