Kim Philby (6 page)

We continued our way to Belgrade by slow stages. The last leg was by night train, so full that we had to stand on the open platform between the coaches, where we choked every time we went through a tunnel. Arriving sleepless at 5 a.m., we had to tramp the streets for an hour before we found somewhere cheap enough.

By now I was beginning to feel the need for home comforts and company, and decided it was time to head for London. Kim preferred to visit Belgrade yet again before returning home. Before he did so, he probably made a side trip down the Danube to the Iron Gates, about a hundred miles east of Belgrade: he claims in his book to have gone there before the war, and this seems the most likely occasion. For my part, after travelling thirty-two hours hard class, I broke the journey at Frankfurt. Not to be outdone by Kim I searched for some time before I
found a cheap enough bed, to discover in the small hours that I was sharing it with at least a dozen bedbugs. Next day, having no German money left, and not wishing to draw more from a bank, I visited the British consulate, outside their official opening hours, to ask if they would kindly give me a mark in exchange for a shilling. The consul justifiably regarded me with loathing, thrust a mark angrily into my hand and told me to beat it. Kim and I at this time seem to have expected an unusual range of services from His Majesty’s consular representatives. Finally, after a day in Rotterdam, I came back to the family flat in the Old Brompton Road. The first thing I did was to have a bath; the second, immediately after, was to have another.

Kim still had a year to go at Cambridge. This was because after managing only a third in Part I of the history tripos he had switched to economics. (In this subject he was eventually to achieve a II:I, which – since firsts in economics were rarely awarded – was probably equivalent to a first in most other subjects.) I never had anything to do with his Cambridge life, nor he with mine at Oxford. Of his friends at Cambridge, to the best of my memory, I met only Michael Stewart, (briefly) John Midgley, mentioned below, and later Guy Burgess. I saw Kim once at Cambridge, when I was on a visit to other Westminster friends. He came once to Oxford, in the autumn of 1932, and we lunched with Maurice Bowra at Wadham. It was a long way from the Adriatic; others were present, the conversation was rather portentous, no one sparkled.

At Cambridge Kim seems to have had few relaxations. He did not play games or take part in social life. But his time must have been fully occupied by his work and by his very deep involvement in the University Socialist Society. I did not hear much about
his Cambridge political activities, now well documented, but it was clear enough then, and is even clearer now, that there was nothing secret about them. I recall his mentioning that he had even begun making political speeches, in spite of his stammer. I saw him little if at all in the Christmas vacation of 1932–33 because he had gone to stay in Nottingham as part of his political education.

In January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Kim suggested we should go to Berlin in the Easter vacation and see what was happening. I had vague ideas at the time of trying to get into journalism after I had finished at Oxford, and agreed at once. So it was that we arrived in Berlin on 21 March,
der Tag von Potsdam
.
^†
A huge torchlight street parade was held that evening, ostensibly in celebration of the reopening of the Reichstag in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, but primarily it was a Nazi propaganda exercise. We watched from a balcony in the Potsdamer Straße, where we had taken a room. Somebody in the next house was feeding out a roll of toilet paper high above the heads of the marching storm troopers. It was hard to say whether this represented enthusiasm, crude German humour or, as I hoped, disrespect.

We were staying in the house where Kim had stayed on his previous visit in July. It was not a left-wing place, rather the opposite. One of the tenants was a storm trooper, and he and we used to meet in the landlady’s room to argue politics. Kim and I were
quite open about our anti-Nazism – or rather Kim was, since my German was not good enough to sustain a discussion. As far as I remember he argued that Nazism was not a revolutionary movement, but merely a reactionary means of preserving capitalism against the advance of socialism; and that the form it was taking in Germany was likely to lead to war. We made fun in a small way about the military exercises the storm trooper took part in at weekends in the nearby countryside; small, middle aged, slightly pot bellied, he was an unimpressive physical specimen of Aryan manhood. On his side he would riposte strongly but good-humouredly – he was really quite a nice little man – while the landlady, who had a soft spot for Kim, would listen nervously in case anyone overheard. The
Gleichschaltung
^†
of Germany into totalitarianism was by no means complete at this time. Kim, who had brought one or two Marxist books with him, added to these by buying a twelve-volume set of Lenin, in German, from a street barrow. As he pointed out, this was the time and place to buy that sort of book cheap. But outwardly Berlin was now a sea of Nazi flags and anti-Jewish notices: even Wedding, formerly a communist district, was no exception.

Kim’s politics had developed a good deal in the six months since our Balkan trip. It was not so much a shift of view as a wider knowledge of and especially a greater interest in Marxism. I am said to have described him at this time as a communist,
⁴
and I probably did, for want of a better label, though I am not
sure precisely what, at the age of twenty, I would have meant by ‘communist’. If it meant someone who slavishly accepted an imposed party line – or sudden change of line – then, I would have said, that could not be Kim. I always thought of him as the most independent-minded person I had ever met. Talking to him, I realised that most of my views were received views; Kim seemed to have thought out all of his for himself. But at the time he must have seen in Marx a golden key to the interpretation of history and of political and economic struggle. He admired Lenin as a practical revolutionary who had simultaneously put it all down in writing. But he did not seem greatly interested in Russia; the Communist Party of Germany, which had been capable of polling several million votes in a general election, had been of much more concern to him. The German Communists had been unable to prevent Hitler’s advance and were now in eclipse. Possibly this helped to turn Kim, always a believer in the realities of power, away from international communism and towards the Soviet Union as the mainspring of resistance to fascism.

Our three weeks in Berlin were very different from our previous trips abroad. Each of us had brought work and spent a good part of the day on this. Sometimes we went out together but often each would wander off on his own. One day Kim ran into a Cambridge acquaintance, John Midgley, whom we met thereafter once or twice. I think he was with us when we attended a political rally which has been mentioned in one or two books or articles on Kim. It has been said that when the Nazi salute was given Kim heroically braved hostility by refusing to raise his arm. It is true that we didn’t salute; but heroism was unnecessary since those standing near us either realised we were foreign or
were not the kind to make a fuss. At the same time, it is also likely that we would have gone to some lengths to avoid giving the salute or saying ‘Heil Hitler’.

To return to the question I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, did these three journeys involve any direct or indirect contact between Kim and the Soviet intelligence service? Alternatively, was he brought to their notice as a result of them? I cannot of course speak for those periods when I was not in his company, for instance immediately before and after the 1932 journey, or during his Berlin side trip, or for that matter the many occasions on our Berlin visit of 1933 when we were separated. All I can vouch for is that while we were together nothing happened to suggest even remotely to me a Soviet or other clandestine contact, presence or interest, direct or indirect.

In June 1933 Kim came down from Cambridge for good. I think he must have gone off to Vienna almost immediately (in his book he says that his underground work began in central Europe in June 1933), and I doubt if I saw him before he left. According to Elizabeth Monroe,
⁵
Kim’s stated intention was to improve his German with a view to getting into the Foreign Service. He seems not to have publicised this intention very widely: I myself had a hazy but erroneous impression that he was doing a postgraduate year at Vienna University. (His German was already good; if he had been thinking only of the Foreign Service it would have made much more sense to go to France for a year. Good French was more or less obligatory.) Perhaps his chief reason for going to Austria was to get into the thick of European politics. If so, he chose well: the winter of 1933–34 saw Viennese socialism crushed by Chancellor Dollfuss, and the huge socialist-built blocks of workers’ flats blasted by government artillery. Kim, as is
now known, threw himself into the task of aiding left-wingers in danger from the police, including refugees from Nazi Germany, and helping to organise assistance and escape.

I heard nothing of this activity at the time, and little later. Kim scarcely ever wrote to me, and in any case could not have written freely in the circumstances. But in February 1934 I had a letter to say he was about to be married to a girl with whom he had been sharing a charming flat for some weeks. The flat was described, the girl was not. I wrote back to congratulate him, adding regretfully that I supposed this meant the end of our travels. I had had hopes that after the Oxford summer term was over it might be possible to make one more journey abroad with Kim before we each got down to the business of earning our livings.

Lizy (for so she spelt it, not Litzi) was Jewish, of part-Hungarian origin, a communist or communist sympathiser, and a year or two older than Kim.
⁶
She had already been married and divorced. Kim had met her soon after arriving in Vienna and for a time had lodged in her parents’ house. They arrived in London in May 1934, but it was several weeks before I saw them. Up to mid-June I was totally preoccupied with greats, and thereafter equally preoccupied with a German girl I had met. It was not until July that I first met the couple, at Dora Philby’s house in Acol Road. Lizy was quite different from what I had expected: a
jolie laide
, more
laide
perhaps than
jolie
, very feminine, not obviously ‘intellectual’, but full of animation; her attraction lay in her liveliness and sense of fun. She can hardly have been the kind of wife Kim’s family had expected him to marry; but since his middle teens he had been accustomed to make his own decisions.

By now I was at a loose end. The German girl was about to return to Frankfurt, and it was not the best time of year to start
looking for a job. At that moment Dollfuss was assassinated. Vienna seemed clearly the place to be, as Berlin had been sixteen months earlier. Vienna had the added attraction that Frankfurt lay en route. Kim and Lizy supplied me with names and addresses of Viennese friends. I left for Vienna – stopping over in Frankfurt – in early August.

It may be that Vienna was the place where Kim was recruited or spotted by the Russians, but I am sorry to say that I can report little of interest from my own visit. First, nothing of the smallest political importance happened: Vienna was completely quiet again. Second, although I duly contacted nearly all the friends named on my list, I learnt little or nothing of the exciting underground political life that Kim and Lizy must have been leading. Probably their friends were cautious over what they said to a newcomer, but an equally important reason was that scarcely any of them spoke any English and my German was halting. If I had been able to meet the only Englishman on my list, the
Daily Telegraph
correspondent Eric Gedye,
⁷
I would probably have learnt more, but he was out of Vienna all that month. One friend I remember was the daughter of an imprisoned Austrian Socialist deputy. She was acting as a guide to British tourists from the Workers’ Travel Association, and I joined in one of her conducted tours. As tourists they were like most others – Schönbrunn was not as good as Leeds, and where could they get a cup of tea? – but they were also fervent socialists to a man, or woman, and keen to discuss what was happening in Austria. Our guide thought it safest to wait until we had reached the Vienna woods and left the bus. At her instruction we became quite conspiratorial, huddling together, lowering our voices and keeping a lookout for strangers. There is a similarity here to
the story recounted in Patrick Seale’s book
⁸
of a conspiratorial socialist meeting in the Vienna forest arranged by Kim through an Austrian girl for Gedye. Perhaps it was the same girl. Another on my list was a refugee from Berlin, living under an assumed name. But while all these friends appeared to be left wing, and in some apprehension of what the future might bring for them, none seems a likely candidate for a Soviet intelligence role in relation to Kim.

After a two-day visit to Budapest by river, and a final week in Frankfurt, I was back in England. Jobs were hard to come by in September 1934. Before I had made any progress, I went down with severe tonsillitis. For convalescence Dora Philby offered the use of a cottage she rented in north Wales, fronting directly on to the scenic narrow-gauge railway between Blaenau Ffestiniog and Portmadoc. Here my mother and I spent a week or two. The trains, which went by gravity alone in the westward direction, had ceased to run now that the summer was over, and the nearest road of any kind was a mile and a half away. It was a delightful place.