Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  “Not at all. We would be helping out the only country in Europe that stands against Hitler. We would be contributing to the defeat of Fascism, thus saving Britain.”

  Kim laughed off my suggestion. “A spy could be tortured,” he said. “Have you thought of that?”

  “He’d have to be caught first. We would never be caught. Who would think a couple of Cambridge boys like us would spy for the Reds.”

  “Who indeed? I suppose you’ve figured out how one goes about offering one’s services. P-post a letter to the Soviet embassy, perhaps? Better still, buttonhole Ambassador Maisky on his morning constitutional in Kensington Gardens.”

  “That’s where your father comes in,” I told Kim. “If he really works for SIS as we all think, he will know the identity of the NKVD’s man in London. You could pry it out of your paterfamilias somehow—tell him you’re doing an article for your Review on Soviet spies in Britain. Christ, if we knew the name of the NKVD’s man in London, be a bloody piece of cake to get in touch with him.”

  “You’re mad, Guy.”

  “The very least you can do is agree to think about it.”

  “I most certainly will not think about it.”

  Kim waved a hand to get the attention of the serving girl and motioned for the check.

  Waiting for it to come, I worked up the nerve to raise something that had been a sore point between us for years. “Kim, we never really talk about it—”

  “What’s there to talk about? What happened, happened. Comes under the heading of spilt milk.”

  “We were both quite tanked up…”

  “I never b-blamed you, Guy. If I b-blamed anyone, it was myself. You were being true to your nature.”

  “I do want to apologize for having pushed you past where you were comfortable going.”

  “I accepted your apology long b-before it was offered.”

  “Does your Magyar know about it?”

  “She knows something happened. She knows what buggered means. She doesn’t know it was you.”

  “Just as well.” I smiled at a memory. “Yes, well, actually, there was a boy at the Metropole.”

  “I guessed as much. All this sudden devotion to Soviet Russia. All this talk of b-becoming NKVD spies.”

  “His name was Igor. At least that was the name he gave me. Jolly good chap. We fucked, of course.”

  “Was that wise? They might try to b-blackmail you—”

  “Who could they tell that doesn’t already know?”

  “I take your p-point.”

  “Afterward I invited him to a hole-in-the-wall down an alleyway across the river from the Kremlin serving something that was passed off as food. Igor produced a paper bag his mother had given him. It was filled with spring onions. He shared them with me when they brought around the alleged borscht. He talked about Stalin and the metro being built by some Ukrainian named Khrushchev, he talked about the great dams that are supplying electrical energy to giant factories. It wasn’t propaganda, Kim. It was the genuine article. He was patriotic. Proud to be Russian, proud to be contributing to the construction of Communism. When we parted company, he called me comrade. Tovarish in Russian. Tovarish Guy, he whispered as we strolled past Lenin’s mausoleum, just so you will know, I pick up foreigners at the Metropole and report on what they say to the secret police.”

  “That’s how Igor contributes to the construction of Communism?”

  “You will laugh but the answer is yes. Igor does what he can. From each according to his ability. And I realized—how to begin to explain this?—that our all-night exegesis of Das Kapital in Matthew’s Café, that the weekends we spent canvassing for Socialist candidates across the railway bridge in Romsey Town—all of it was castles in the air. You were the only one of us to take himself off to where these Socialist ideals of ours were put to the test. I admire you for that, Kim. Truly. I have done nothing to compare.”

  “You haven’t said your last word.” He looked around to be sure he couldn’t be overheard. “Between you, me, and the microphone that’s supposed to be in every wall, Guy, I am trying to join the British Communist Party.”

  “Did you mail them an application?”

  “I saved the p-postage. Showed up at the party’s central committee H.Q. on King Street.”

  I was intrigued. “You just waltzed in off the street? No letter of introduction, no password, whatever? What in the world did they say?”

  “A very stodgy switchboard operator turned out to be the only human in sight. He copied down my name, rank, and serial number. Cambridge Socialist Society. Vienna. Mumbling something about their having to suss me out, he asked for the names of three p-people who could vouch for me. I hope you don’t take it amiss, Guy, but I gave your name, along with Don Maclean’s and Anthony Blunt’s.”

  “Then what happened?”

  The pot pie seemed to have given Kim indigestion. He produced a tin of Arm & Hammer tablets from his pocket, offered me one and when I declined, took one himself. “He didn’t seem particularly b-bowled over by my candidacy,” he said, his words a bit slurred from sucking on the tablet in his mouth. “Said they would get back to me in six weeks’ time.”

  I think I whistled. “Six weeks! I’m not sure your best interests were served by using me as a reference. Well, what’s done is done.” A small straw basket with the check in it was deposited on the table. I picked up the reckoning and divided the number in two. “What do you say we pay the piper, mate?”

  I remember his answer. “Trick is to avoid p-paying the bloody p-piper, isn’t it?”

  3: LONDON, JUNE 1934

  Where an Englishman Accepts a Proposition He Doesn’t Quite Understand

  I am the Teodor Stepanovich Maly, cryptonym Mann, about whom you have no doubt heard a great deal. Much of what you have heard is malicious fabrication. Permit me to set the record straight. I was posted to the London Rezidentura in 1933, first as the principal deputy to the Rezident (cryptonym Marr), then, after his sudden recall to Moscow and execution, as Rezident. In both capacities I attempted to convince Moscow Centre to abandon, or at least scale back, efforts to recruit high-ranking British diplomats or political figures—what we professionals call recruiting into access—and concentrate instead on long-term penetrations: There existed an entire generation of British intellectuals who became disenchanted with the ruling classes after the Great War, who started to doubt the capitalist fairy tale of the ever-expanding pie when unemployment soared in the wake of the crash of ’29, who gravitated toward Marx’s analysis of the inevitable decline of industrial capitalism, who with the rise of Hitler in Germany came to see the Soviet Union as the bulwark against Fascism. I had even located the epicenter of this political seism: It was in the sacrosanct halls of Cambridge University in the medieval town of Cambridge, more precisely in one of Cambridge’s several colleges, Trinity. In the early years of this decade, the nascent Socialist movement on campus limited itself to reading the Daily Worker aloud at meetings, pamphlet writing, and late-night discussion groups where, with any luck, the members of the Socialist Society could discuss the Socialist girls straight into bed. With the arrival of a handful of genuine proletarians, namely half a dozen miners from the coal face who ate the cores when they ate apples, a local Communist cell came into existence; the miners, who roped drums of coal to their waists and dragged them out of airless tunnels, had taken part in the bitter thirty-week general strike of 1926 only to be bought off with scholarships to Cambridge. I wasn’t really interested in the miners. My idea was to recruit young and eager upper-class leftist intellectuals from the Socialist and Communist ranks willing to transfer their loyalties to the internationalist anti-Fascist movement. We would then channel their professional careers in the hope they might wind up working as Fleet Street journalists or junior Foreign Office clerks. If we were diligent in selecting talented recruits, they would, with the passage of time, rise through the ranks to positions of consequence, giving us access to the state’s thinking, perhaps
even to the state’s secrets.

  Such was the proposition that Moscow Centre was mulling with its usual lack of enthusiasm for original ideas when Harold Adrian Philby literally fell into my lap.

  I should say straightaway that Philby’s name was not unknown to me. His potential for recruitment had been put forward in Vienna by a young Hungarian-Jewish comrade who worked for the Centre. Her name was Litzi Friedman. One of the semimonthly reports from her controller, cryptonym Arnold, mentioned a young upper-crust British Socialist fresh from Trinity College, Cambridge; the Friedman woman described him as an ardent anti-Fascist who had motorcycled from Britain to Austria to join in the struggle against the dictator Dollfuss. Moscow Centre was intrigued enough to assign the Englishman the German cryptonym Söhnchen (Sonny in English) and dispatch me to Vienna to sit in on one of Arnold’s meetings with the Friedman woman. I was careful to position myself in a corner of the room filled with shadow. I remember Litzi Friedman commending the young Englishman as a committed Marxist and a fast learner, someone capable of keeping secret things secret should Moscow Centre decide to recruit him as an agent. In Vienna Sonny wound up sharing a bed with Litzi Friedman where, one supposes—for her sake one hopes—he was as ardent a lover as he was anti-Fascist. After Dollfuss crushed the Austrian Socialist opposition, Sonny married the Friedman woman at the Vienna town hall so she would qualify for a British passport and then fled with her to the safety of London. The centre, in its infinite wisdom, instructed me to resume contact with Litzi Friedman and sound her out again about the possibility of recruiting as an active agent the British gentleman who was now her lawful wedded husband.

  This I did. I met with her in London on three occasions. At the first meeting she looked at me with undisguised curiosity. “Have we met before?” she asked.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “It’s the triangular mustache. The man who sat in on one of my sessions with Arnold in Vienna was tall and thin like you and had a triangular mustache on his upper lip. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “I have never been to Vienna,” I replied.

  She laughed. “It was you,” she said. She waved a hand. “No matter.”

  The only thing that had changed about the Friedman woman since our paths had crossed in Vienna was her hair—I remember it being the color of rust then, now it was pearl-gray. I found Litzi Friedman to be a moody young woman who arrived at each meeting with her hair dyed a different color. She confessed to being bored to tears by the British and their class distinctions. I concluded that she was eager to be of service to the internationale but erratic in her behavior (she was quite capable of squandering the little money her husband earned on footwear) and, if I am any judge, immature in her Marxist indoctrination. Oh, she was familiar enough with the general argument: dialectical materialism, the class struggle as the motor of social change, history as a science based on thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But she was inept at analysis that required excavating under the surface of political events. Convincing me how passionately she supported the Soviet Union seemed to be her top priority. As I wrote in the report I filed with Moscow Centre after each of our meetings, I did not consider her to be a potentially important contributor to our cause. This husband of hers, this Harold Adrian Philby, was (to employ the British idiom) a different kettle of fish entirely.

  Friedman’s praise of Philby was ringing in my ears when the note from the Central Committee of the British Communist Party crossed my desk. This same Philby had applied to join the party. With respect to long-term penetration agents, he was made to measure: young, ardent, idealistic, iconoclastic, disgusted with the muck the Great Powers had made of Europe after the Great War, Cambridge educated, socialist oriented, upper-class with (as I came to appreciate) an appropriate amount of guilt at not having honest working-class dirt under his fingernails. He was one of those pampered aristocrats who threw away the cores when they ate apples. In addition he was the son of an eccentric Englishman, Harry St John Philby, who had converted to Islam and gone off to live in Arabia, where he was known to be a confidant of the Saudi monarch, ibn Saud. St John was thought to have the usual old school connections on Fleet Street and perhaps even in Caxton House, the nerve center of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, known also as MI6. As far as the younger Philby was concerned, there was a bonus to be had: Like a great many undergraduates of his day, Philby had belonged to the Cambridge University Socialist Society, attending meetings in the beer vapors of Matthew’s Café, arguing into the early hours whether there was any point in handing out the Daily Worker to dog-tired workers living on the wrong side of the railway bridge in Romsey Town; Philby, who according to Litzi Friedman considered himself a Marxist by the time he left university, had nibbled at the edges of the Cambridge Communist cell when it came into existence, but had by a fortunate twist of fate never actually joined, which meant that his name would be spotless as a newly minted halfpenny for the inevitable background checks his candidacy for a government or Fleet Street job would provoke.

  I asked for, and received by return telegram, permission from Moscow Centre to attempt to recruit Harold Adrian Philby to work for Soviet intelligence. It goes without saying, I gave Litzi Friedman detailed instructions to be sure she and the young Philby were not being followed when she brought him to that first meeting in Regent’s Park. She was to tell him only that he would be seeing someone important. Nothing more. She was to take three different taxis, getting out each time before the hack reached the destination she had given the driver. She was to use one-way streets, walking against traffic, to disrupt any automobile-based surveillance. She was to use Harrods emporium, entering through one door, going up in the lifts, descending by a staircase, exiting into the always teeming Brompton Road by another door. The entire process was not to take less than three hours.

  As for me, I employed my usual technique for avoiding surveillance. The Soviet embassy was under observation day and night. I had even spotted men with binoculars and motion picture cameras on tripods behind a venetian blind in a window diagonally across the street from our principal entrance. Along with my driver and my male secretary (who concealed himself in the boot), I got into one of our limousines in the courtyard and we set off through the gates into traffic. My driver, who was quite experienced in evasion techniques, immediately identified two automobiles following at a discreet distance. Obeying my instructions to the letter, he made no effort to lose them in the congested streets. Instead we meandered through the midmorning traffic in the general direction of Hampstead and its heath. With the heath in sight, my driver turned into a narrow one-way street going the wrong way. A British bobby a block along started to wave us down until he noticed the diplomatic license plate, at which point he contented himself with ordering us to turn off, which we did. My driver pulled into an alleyway and parked in a lot behind a Chinese restaurant long enough for my secretary to take my place in the backseat and me to retrieve from the boot an umbrella and a bowler hat. My limousine set off in one direction. With the bowler set squarely on my head, I set off on foot in the other direction. I had no difficulty blending into the late-morning crowds on the street. I went into an underground station and took the Tube, getting off and doubling back on my tracks several times until I was persuaded I was not being tailed. It was then and only then that I made my way to the Regent’s Park Tube station. Emerging from the underground, I began walking at a leisurely pace through the park in the direction of the zoo to the north. I settled onto a park bench on a little-used path and regarded my wristwatch. It was precisely eleven thirty-three. I could see the Friedman woman walking toward me from the direction of the Round House, which had been opened the previous year to accommodate a pair of gorillas. Oh, these English—if they treated their workers as well as their gorillas one could almost like them. A lean young man a head taller than Litzi Friedman walked a pace or two behind her and off to one side. When they were twenty or so paces away, I raised a forefinger—a prearranged signal
asking if she was sure they had not been followed. She removed her straw hat (I noticed her hair was dyed platinum blond) and fanned her face with its brim—a prearranged signal assuring me that she had taken appropriate precautions and spotted no one behind her. She stopped to exchange a word with the young man. Smiling at him, she nodded in my direction, then started back toward the zoo. The young man approached. I stood up and offered my hand. “Hello,” I said.

  He shook it. “Hello.”

  “You will be the Harold Philby of whom Litzi Friedman has spoken in glowing terms.”

  “Whatever she told you was surely an exaggeration. She failed to mention your name.”

  “It’s Otto,” I said. I motioned toward the bench and we both sat down. “Do you mind if I call you Harold?”

  “I prefer my nickname, Kim.”

  “Kim it shall be.” I produced a pack of English cigarettes. “Smoke?”

  He selected one from the cardboard package. I held the flame of my lighter to the end of his cigarette, and then to mine. The smoke from our two cigarettes intermingled as we regarded each other. Philby said, “May I assume this has to do with my app-pplication to join the Communist P-Party?”

  The Friedman woman had not mentioned the stammer. “You are free to assume anything you want,” I said with a cheerful laugh, “though in this particular case you would be dead wrong.”

  “Ahhh, yes. I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see there may b-be more to this rendezvous than meets the eye.”

  The night before my meeting with Philby I had gone to the trouble of writing out what I would say as if it were a script for a radio drama. I had taken to heart the advice my late predecessor had once given me with respect to recruiting agents: Tone was every bit as important as the actual words. All that remained for me to do, sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, squinting at my interlocutor because of the dazzling sunlight, was play the role I had assigned myself: I had to make him feel as if he had found a kindred spirit and a lifelong friend. “If you want to join the party,” I began, “of course they will accept you into its ranks with open arms.”