Kim Philby (8 page)

This was in May 1937. Lizy and I gave a farewell party for him at my mother’s house in St Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea, where I was living. We each asked about fifteen to twenty guests. Lizy’s included some of the ‘Mitteleuropas’; mine included friends in advertising. Fairly early in the evening a friendly policeman turned up to say that there had been complaints about the noise, but he agreed the law could do nothing about it as long as we stayed indoors. Well after midnight he knocked again, with the same message. This time we hauled him in, gave him a drink, put on his helmet and were photographed with him. The party went on till after dawn.

I mention these trivia because life – Kim’s life no less than anyone else’s – consists mostly of trivia. One gets the impression from many books on Kim – including to some extent his own – that he was always serious, always immersed in his lone silent thirty years’ war. The TV film
Philby, Burgess and Maclean
²
made him out to be dull, the one thing Kim never was. You could not imagine from this film that he could be great fun, and had a personal magnetism for many people. I don’t know whether he enjoyed the farewell part – probably not, he seemed a little subdued – but he usually had a very positive attitude towards life and the enjoyment of it.

Now followed a period of some four and a half years when I saw Kim comparatively rarely. When I joined SIS in October 1941 my wife Marie, whom I had known since early in 1937 and in whose company I usually was from that time, had met Kim only three or four times. I saw him not much more often than this.

Soon after Kim left for Spain as a
Times
correspondent, I made an abortive attempt to join him there for a few days during my annual fortnight’s holiday from Benson’s. This was in August
1937. I still nursed hopes of breaking into journalism, and Kim had told me that if I had some sort of journalistic pretext he could probably fix my entry with the Spanish Nationalists. I see from my old passport that on 23 August the British vice-consul in Bayonne endorsed it as valid for a single journey to Spain: ‘Holder is proceeding there as correspondent of the London General Press.’ It was from this agency, according to the
Sunday Times
, that Kim had a letter of accreditation when he visited Spain in February, so I assume he must have organised my own letter. Having applied to the Spanish Nationalist Office in, I think, Biarritz, I went on to St Jean-de-Luz. There, according to Kim, I would be sure to pick up at the Bar Basque all that could be learnt in France of the movements of himself and other journalists in Franco’s Spain. I did indeed meet many journalists there, some of whom had seen Kim very recently. Unfortunately, Franco’s troops were engaged at that moment in a drive on Santander in north-west Spain, and Kim, who was with them (indeed he entered the town ahead of them), was incommunicado. None of the journalists was on the point of going back into Spain, and whatever messages I was able to send off to Kim were unlikely to reach him in time. After a few days of sunning and bathing in the Atlantic surf, I gave it up and spent my second week walking in the French Pyrenees; I could not risk getting back to the office late. Sometime after my return to London my Nationalist permit came through, but of course could not be used.

One small incident occurred during the Spanish war which might conceivably have given a slight clue that Kim had other interests and stresses in his life besides those of being a
Times
correspondent. In 1937 a young friend of mine and Marie’s at Benson’s, Buz Brackenbury, who was then a romantic leftist, had
walked out of his job and was next heard of driving a truck on the Spanish Republican side. After about a year of this, and disenchanted with what he had seen, he conceived the idea of visiting Nationalist Spain as a freelance journalist. He entered from France under his original surname, Klein, but had not got very far before he was arrested. Accused of being a Republican spy and faced with threats of a firing squad, he claimed friendship with the
Times
correspondent, H. A. R. Philby. (I think he had probably met Kim only at the farewell party. He may also have said that they were at school together, although in fact his career at Westminster began after Kim had left.) Kim told the Nationalists that he hardly knew him but believed him to be merely young and irresponsible. In the event Buz was simply taken to the frontier and thrown out. When I next saw Kim, he was still extremely incensed by the whole affair: he said he had been put in serious danger. At the time I thought he was making unusually heavy weather of it. I can see now that it was very awkward for him, but would it have been quite so awkward if he had been simply the impeccable
Times
correspondent? After all, anybody in a jam might claim anybody as an acquaintance on the basis of one meeting. Buz obviously behaved unwisely but he needs no apologia: he joined the RAF at the outbreak of the war, and was later killed.

I followed Kim’s career from
The Times
, to the extent that its then rather impersonal reporting traditions allowed, and read with great relief of his remarkable escape from death in the Teruel region on the last day of 1937. A Republican shell – Russian made – blew up the car in which Kim and three other correspondents were sitting; Kim was the sole survivor. I remember only one letter from Kim in Spain, and one sentence
in it: ‘Frances Doble is here and very nice.’
³
He said no more about this quite well-known London actress of the 1920s and early 1930s, whom I had seen on stage or screen; it could have been just a chatty news item. It was not until I read the books on Kim that I learnt of their prolonged affair in Spain. Whatever role Kim and I played in each other’s lives, it was never that of confidant about personal matters.

Kim was
The Times
’s correspondent in Nationalist Spain, attached to Franco’s headquarters, for more than two years. Some writers seem to have interpreted this as almost equivalent to fighting on Franco’s side, and as something which his former left-wing friends found shocking in itself. This puzzles me; newspaper correspondents posted to Soviet-era Moscow, for example, were not thereby branded as communists. It is true that Kim’s despatches from Spain often tended to give a favourable picture of the Nationalists. But in those days a foreign journalist’s report on a totalitarian country or regime was allowed very little freedom – far less than now; and on top of that Kim was working for a newspaper which under Geoffrey Dawson went out of its way not to upset relations with Hitler’s Germany. I never felt that Kim’s reporting reflected his true feelings, but did not find this remarkable; caught between Franco and Geoffrey Dawson, he seemed to have little choice. Was I not myself writing ecstatically about products in which I had not the smallest interest? Yet I and some of my colleagues drew the line at (and were excused from) writing advertisements for the Conservative Party, one of the Benson accounts. I sometimes thought that Kim went further than he needed in presenting the Nationalists in a good light, but concluded that he was not his own master; and that, of course, was truer than I knew.

From recent accounts it appears that some of Kim’s fellow journalists in Spain regarded him as slightly out of the ordinary: unusually well informed, unusually interested in military information of a kind too detailed for press despatches. No one seems to have suspected the truth, or even to have surmised that he might secretly be reporting to, say, the Spanish Republicans. One or two journalists concluded that he was working for British intelligence. Kim himself says that ‘to the best of his knowledge’ – and I am sure this is true – his first contact with the British secret services took place in the summer of 1940. But he admits that in both Germany and Spain he had half-expected an approach. He must have been hoping for one; it would have made him even more interesting to the Russians. He told me that on one occasion while travelling southwards through Spain to Gibraltar – probably during his freelance visit – he had found his progress continually coinciding with that of a Spanish Nationalist military unit of especial interest, and on arrival in Gibraltar he had reported what he saw to British authorities. But if he hoped thereby to attract the attention of the Secret Service, it evidently had no effect.

Though I was not in close enough touch to be aware of it, his and Lizy’s marriage had probably been coming apart for some time before he first went to Spain in early 1937. This may have been a factor in his decision to go abroad (I am sure it is a mistake to see every move in his life as entirely dictated by the needs of Soviet intelligence). He and Lizy never shared a home and life together after February 1937, although they were no doubt under the same roof when he came back in May of that year and perhaps occasionally later. In about 1938 she took an apartment in Paris, but sometimes appeared in London; in fact,
I connect the ‘Mitteleuropas’ more with 1938–39 than earlier. I last saw them, and Lizy, in the early days of the war.

One final comment on Kim and Lizy’s marriage. The Scarlet Pimpernel theory makes little sense to me. Although Lizy was subject to some kind of police supervision, she could probably have got out of Austria without much difficulty, at least up to March 1938 when Hitler invaded the country. The theory that the Russians were behind the marriage also holds little water. Why should they prescribe a marriage which, almost immediately, it was apparently in their interests to see undone? It may be that Lizy had some direct or indirect contact with Soviet intelligence in Vienna and it may be that Kim had been introduced to them by the time of his marriage, but I doubt whether the Russians were then – if ever – in a position to dictate to him what he should do about so private and personal an affair as marriage.

During this last year or two of peace I saw a little more of Kim’s mother and sisters than I had previously. Diana, the eldest, was put through the gruesome process of ‘coming out’: presentation at Court, debs’ parties, large formal dances. Kim of course was in Spain and his father was usually in the Middle East, so Dora Philby had to do most of the organising. She joined forces with some of the Sassoon family, whose daughter was also coming out, and a party for both girls was held in the grand Sassoon house at Albert Gate. I was roped in for this as for one or two other expensive junketings. The two younger sisters, Pat and Helena, had plenty of the family intelligence and charm. Pat went to Cambridge, became a civil servant and married someone named Milne (not related to me), but her marriage broke up and she eventually died tragically. Helena appears later in these pages. I also met from time to time their grandmother – St
John’s mother – a splendid old battleaxe and matriarchal figure who was treated with great respect and affection by all members of the family.

I must have seen Kim three or four times on his return visits from Spain, but it was not until about the summer of 1939 that I realised what a change had come over him. It was not just that he had grown fatter – too fat for a young man – but he seemed to have discarded all his previous asceticism and idealism, which I had admired without much wishing to follow. Now the talk was about the fleshpots of Spain, the booze, the marvellous seafood, the nightly fish train which ran, with priority over guns and soldiers, from Vigo to the Nationalist-held north-west area of Madrid. He did not go so far as to suggest he had moved over to support of the Nationalists: on the contrary, he avoided ideological judgements altogether. Perhaps I was now, belatedly, getting a taste of the cover plan: but I think also that there was a real change of attitude in Kim. He was more cynical, more worldly wise, more interested in material comforts, more gregarious. Indeed, he had become a rather Falstaffian figure, and seemed to enjoy it: with some glee he said that a doctor had told him that he – then twenty-seven – had the arteries of a man of fifty. I was intrigued by the change, but at the same time disappointed. It was more than two years before I found myself once again
en rapport
.

Those two years were, approximately, the first two years of the war. I have no idea what Kim’s reaction, genuine or assumed, may have been to the Nazi–Soviet pact and the carve-up of Poland: if I saw him at all at this moment it has left no impression. But very soon he was off to France as a
Times
correspondent with the British forces. I for my part got married at Christmas,
and joined the Royal Engineers in June 1940. The fall of France and my arrival at Fort Widley near Portsmouth, where I was to join the Royal Engineers Survey Training Centre as a cadet, are forever interlocked in my memories. The next four months, spent partly in basic military training but much more in learning every aspect of map-making, were among the fullest and most fascinating of my working life, even though my total Army pay in all that time came to no more than eight pounds. But in November 1940 I was commissioned, and spent the next eleven months in the training and administration of others – tasks which had little attraction for me. For most of this time Marie and I were living at Ruabon, in Denbighshire. I heard almost nothing of Kim, but Marie ran into him in the winter of 1940–41 in Shaftesbury. He was with a woman whom later we were to know so well – Aileen, who eventually became his second wife.

In April 1941 Kim wrote to me to say that there was a job going in his outfit (I had no idea what this was) for which I might possibly be suited, and if I was interested he could arrange lunch in London with the people concerned. Keen to get away from north Wales, I accepted at once. Over lunch at the Normandie I was told a little – very little – about the proposed job, which as far as I recall involved training people in covert propaganda, producing leaflets and so on. Kim, I learnt, was working at Beaulieu for SOE, the Special Operations Executive, but my ignorance of secret organisations at this time was total. He had thought my knowledge of advertising might be useful, as no doubt it would have been. However, the job went to an older and more experienced advertising man who was present at the same lunch.