Kim Philby (26 page)

His export–import job folded up after some months, and for two years or more he had no real employment outside desultory
journalism. At one moment he had hopes of being engaged to do some work on the script of a film, an ambitious project about the life of primitive man. ‘It’s got one thing going for it,’ said Kim. ‘I don’t believe there’s ever before been a film showing men and women completely naked.’ One fairly well-known actor was said to be interested, and Kim attended a few meetings, but nothing came of the idea.

Kim began to spend less and less time at The Sun Box, and our own visits there became rarer. We continued to see Aileen occasionally, however, partly because our daughter had gone to a kindergarten attended also at different times by three of the Philby children, Tommy, Miranda and the youngest boy, Harry: the third generation of Philbys and Milnes to be at school together. But we also saw Connie and Kim in London. Some kind of rift arose between us and the two of them. The immediate cause was never clear at the time and now escapes me altogether, but the underlying reason must have been that we were seeing both Kim and Aileen, sometimes together but usually separately, and were finding ourselves in an ever-falser position. Before long, the rift was patched up and Kim and I had a drink together. Exceptionally, he talked of personal matters and his estrangement from Aileen. I asked whether the Burgess–Maclean affair had made matters worse. On the contrary, said Kim, it had helped to bring them together for a time.

In about 1954 the family moved from Rickmansworth to a house near Crowborough, Sussex, which we visited once or twice. My London stint was now nearing its end, and we were preparing for a move to Berne. In the summer of 1955 we gave a farewell party to which we invited Kim and Connie. It was rather a disastrous affair. Not only Kim but, surprisingly, Connie
got tight. For once in my life I lost my temper with Kim and bawled him out. They came round the next day, disarmingly contrite, and we all laughed it off.

The worst of his bad time was now nearly over, but first the suspicions which had lain dormant for so long were to come into the open. The change began with an article in
The People
in September 1955 in which Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet defector of the previous year, asserted that Burgess and Maclean had been Soviet agents ever since their Cambridge days and had defected to avoid arrest. The government was forced to issue a long-promised but not very informative White Paper on the two men. Fleet Street was full of rumours about a Third Man who had warned them. These culminated in Marcus Lipton’s question in the House on 25 October, naming Kim openly for the first time. Marie and I were now on the point of leaving for Switzerland. We had a farewell dinner with Kim at a restaurant and drove him back to his mother’s flat at Drayton Gardens, which had been under siege by reporters for some days. Kim asked us to drop him at the back of the building so that he could climb up the fire escape. For a man facing a supreme crisis in his life, he was remarkably calm and cheerful. We were already in Berne by the time Harold Macmillan made his statement in the Commons: ‘I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country.’

At first I did not regard the statement as making a radical difference, except that the press hunt was now called off. Nothing, as far as I knew, had come to light to remove any suspicions that MI5 or SIS might have entertained for the last four years; whatever evidence they had, for or against him, remained exactly the same. The government, forced to make
a statement, had followed the principle of ‘innocent till proved guilty’. But before long it appeared that the atmosphere had changed after the parliamentary statement, and that Kim, while certainly not restored to official trust and favour, was no longer considered a total outcast. In July, shortly after Colonel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, I received an elated postcard from Kim: he was back in journalism and about to take off for Beirut as
The Observer
’s correspondent.
²
‘What’s the betting I’ll be a war reporter again within six months?’ And so he was, in half that time.

It was not until July 1957 that I saw him again. At the beginning of that year I had been brought back to a London post which involved much travelling. Fairly soon I found myself visiting Beirut. Kim and I had a pleasant and rather mellow evening together, slightly marred at the end by my speaking of Connie. Though I did not know it, and indeed had never heard of her, he was already in love with Eleanor Brewer. Reminders of discarded lives were not welcome.

In December Aileen died. Marie and I had last seen her only a month or so earlier, when the three of us took an assortment of children to the zoo. Kim came back for the funeral. Characteristically, he insisted that the youngest children should not be told of her death before he arrived, as he wished to tell them himself; he was never one to shirk an unpleasant duty. He stayed in England a few weeks, clearing up family affairs. Marie and I went down for a final weekend at Crowborough, not more than a fortnight after Aileen’s death. It could hardly be described as a happy occasion, but the atmosphere was in a way almost light hearted. This was nearly the last time we were to see any of the children. Jo was growing up to be a very pretty girl. The two
elder boys, John and Tommy, just turned fifteen and fourteen, were learning to drive. Kim and I took them out in the old car Aileen had been using, and Kim made each of them take the wheel for a mile or two on the public road. The boys drove just as well as any learners of legal age, but the incident surprised me – it was so out of keeping with the law-abiding Kim I had known.

He returned to Beirut, leaving the children in the care of a sister of Aileen’s and other relatives. After twenty years I was once again following his career from the press, that is to say his despatches in
The Observer
. But one story came through on the grapevine which in its first bald presentation was most alarming. Kim, it was said, had tried to commit suicide by jumping off a high balcony, and had been restrained just in time. A later version was less dramatic: he had got very drunk at a party in a fifth-floor flat and had been seen with one leg over the balcony railing, saying he was sick of this bloody party and was getting out. Somebody pulled him back. Probably, if the story is true, he was too drunk to realise what floor he was on.

I had occasion to visit Beirut again in October 1958. This time Kim said, ‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ and presented Eleanor as his fiancée. That he should be marrying again was quite to be expected, but that it should be an American was not; however, Eleanor, if not
déracinée
, was at least somewhat internationalised by the travelling life she had led for many years. Whereas I had quickly got on terms with Aileen – and Lizy for that matter – I cannot say that I ever came to know Eleanor. She gave the impression that she lacked personality, that her life was shaped for her by others; she seemed something of a lame duck. And yet her book on Kim reveals her as a sensitive, intelligent and sympathetic person. Obviously I missed most of this.

The two of them came to London in December of that year, but after an initial evening together Marie and I did not see or hear from them for some weeks. Then out of the blue Kim telephoned me at my office one Friday evening to ask me to be a witness the next morning at their wedding. I do not know why he left it so late. I had a slight feeling that he thought I would be reluctant to take it on. Anyway, at eleven the next morning Jack Ivens and I, together with Nina and Marie, were at the register office in Russell Square to see them on their way, for better or worse. I think there were no other guests at the ceremony, but a few dropped in at the Ivens house afterwards.

Douglas and Patsy Collins had lent the couple their London flat, a very smart place in Hertford Street where we were invited for a farewell drink before they left for Beirut. We arrived at about half past six to be met at the door by an extremely shaken Eleanor. Kim had passed out and was supine on his bed. Eleanor, Marie and I and the only other guests, the Ivenses, sat around talking uneasily for an hour or two until Kim finally made a brief and groggy appearance. I had scarcely ever known him get drunk in this way, without benefit of outside company. He and Eleanor had apparently had an alcoholic lunch and then gone on drinking.

This was the last time I was to see him for nearly three years. At the end of 1959 I was transferred to Tokyo. When I arrived back in London on leave in November 1961 it so happened that Kim and Eleanor were there on a short visit. The four of us met at our wartime favourite, the Unicorn in Jermyn Street. Kim mentioned – though I never heard more of this – that he might later be visiting Tokyo with Eleanor on journalistic business. They had planned to return to Beirut the following Sunday, overland
as far as Paris, and we arranged to have a last drink on the morning of that day at a pub in Strand-on-the-Green, near where we were staying with Kim’s sister Pat. Regrettably we turned up very late, and the rest of the party – Kim, Eleanor, Pat, Jo and her fiancé – were already on their way back from the pub when we arrived. Kim was a little annoyed. ‘We’d given you up and written you a note,’ he said, and handed me one of his visiting cards, on the back of which he had inscribed in his unforgettable handwriting a message which ran like this: ‘Nothing can excuse defection. God rot you all – but look after Jo.’ Unaccountably the signature, still in Kim’s writing, was ‘Eleanor Philby’. Fussed at being late, we took little note of the message – which incidentally did not appear to be in any way private, even though Jo was there – and would no doubt have thrown the card away if we had not used it to take down Pat and Jo’s telephone numbers. We came across it nearly two years later when packing up before leaving Tokyo. By that time Kim had indeed defected. It is easy now to read all sorts of meanings into this card, but the only one I read into the first four words at the time was that we had let him down by being too late to say goodbye. It was natural, among people accustomed to intelligence jargon, to use a term like defection light-heartedly to mean some minor social dereliction. In any case ‘Nothing can excuse defection’, in the ordinary sense of the word, makes no sense in the context of his life. It is clear from his book that he had had an escape plan for many years. One might as well say ‘Nothing can excuse a lifeboat’ on an ocean liner.

After we had been a few minutes in Pat’s house, the taxi arrived to take Kim and Eleanor to Victoria. The rest of us stood outside in the weak November sunlight to say goodbye. With a last genial
touch of
schadenfreude
, Kim exclaimed, ‘Why Tim, you’re going grey!’ A moment later they were off. I never saw or heard from him again.

Early in March 1963 I was having a quick lunch at home in Tokyo before going back to the embassy. Marie, glancing through the
Japan Times
, came across a four-line news agency item on an inside page which I had missed at breakfast. The Foreign Office had asked the Lebanese government for information about Harold Philby, a British journalist in Beirut, who had disappeared towards the end of January. No more than that; but it did not take much thought to realise that if he had been missing for several weeks without trace, he had almost certainly vanished deliberately. Behind the Iron Curtain? With all that had happened before, it seemed likely enough. But why? I knew nothing at all of his life since he had returned to Beirut – the new suspicions that had fallen on him, the confrontations with an investigator from London and the growing mental strain.
³
One or two improbable scenarios went through my mind in the next few days. Even then I was looking for less disastrous explanations than the obvious.

Some weeks later came the news that Kim was in Russia, and had been a Soviet agent for many years. In the world civil war we were now on opposite sides for ever.

Notes

1
. Constance Ashley-Jones, later Stobo.

2
. He was also the correspondent for
The Economist
; his employment with
The Observer
was arranged by SIS, who had taken him back on their payroll as an agent.

3
. The investigator was Nicholas Elliott, who was a friend of Philby’s and had directly arranged his appointment as Middle East correspondent of
The Observer
in 1956 with Lord Astor, the proprietor, after Philby’s clearance by Harold Macmillan. Station chief in Beirut from 1960 to 1962, Elliott’s selection (by Sir Dick White) as the person chosen by SIS to confront Philby was to cause controversy within his own service as well as within MI5 where the ‘molehunters’ had long been convinced of Philby’s guilt and now wanted to carry out an aggressive and professional interrogation. Flora Solomon’s statement and those of the KGB officer Anatoli Golitsyn, who defected to the Americans in 1961 and provided the first confirmation of a ‘Ring of Five’ spy ring all recruited from Cambridge University in the early 1930s, were the final pieces of evidence needed to confront Philby, who was to be offered immunity against prosecution in return for a full confession. SIS, however, wanted to keep the interrogation an in-house affair and White felt that Elliott as a friend and previous defender of Philby could appeal to the latter’s ‘sense of decency’. Elliott, at the time in charge of SIS operations in Africa, arrived in Beirut and rather bungled the confrontation by managing to leave open the windows of the apartment where the taped interrogation took place. As a result, traffic noise drowned out a good part of the audio recording and only about 80 per cent was able to be successfully transcribed by MI5. Elliott was considered somewhat ‘accident prone’ by a number of his colleagues: in 1956 as the then head of the SIS London station, he had personally approved the choice of the unfortunate frogman Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb to carry out a risky operation in Portsmouth Harbour to inspect the hull of the Russian cruiser
Ordzhonikidze
, which had brought Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin to Britain on a visit to improve Anglo-Soviet relations. Crabb, who smoked sixty cigarettes a day, had a drink problem, suffered from depression and had been to a party the night before the operation, was clearly not in the greatest of shape for such a delicate mission. Unsurprisingly, he never returned from it and his headless body was found washed up on a nearby beach some fourteen months later (according to recent accounts, Crabb had his throat cut by a Russian frogman from the cruiser who was sent down to investigate the flow of air bubbles that were surfacing). The net result was a major diplomatic incident and the dismissal of Sir John Sinclair, the chief of SIS (who was replaced by White), as well as the demotion of the Foreign Office adviser to the service. Elliott, however, managed to keep his job. Part of the
ancien régime
and a ‘robber baron’, one of a small number of senior SIS officers who were regarded as having virtual carte blanche to do what they wanted on behalf of their country, Elliott had joined SIS before the war. (Peter Wright,
Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer
, Viking, New York, 1987, pp. 72–5, 194; Gordon Corera,
MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service
, Phoenix, London, p. 77.)