Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  “I do want to join the party. I want to p-participate in the struggle against Fascism and corporate capitalism.”

  “The struggle takes place on many levels. You can, if you choose, spend your days selling the Daily Worker in working-class neighborhoods. But from what I’ve heard from Miss Friedman, it would be a waste of your time and talents.”

  Söhnchen—as the scene I am describing was set in Britain, I should probably stick with the English translation of his nom de code, Sonny—Sonny appeared to be startled by what I said. “What are my talents?” he demanded.

  A well-dressed woman wearing an ankle-length skirt came down the path, walking her dog on a silver-link leash. I waited until she was out of earshot. “You are, by background, by education, by appearance and manners, an intellectual. You are able to blend in with the bourgeoisie and pass yourself off as one. If you really want to make a significant contribution to the anti-Fascist movement, simple membership in the British Communist Party is not the ticket. The clandestine alternative I am proposing will not be without difficulty, without danger even. But the rewards in terms of personal achievement, in terms of actually bettering the lot of the world’s working classes, will be immense.”

  I remember he was staring at his shoes as I went through my routine. Suddenly he looked up at me with his ice-blue eyes. “Who are you?”

  “I told you, my name is Otto.”

  “I was not b-born yesterday. If it p-pleases you to be known as Otto, I shall call you Otto. But who are you? Whom do you represent?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He let this sink in. The moment was awkward, with his question hanging unanswered—and unanswerable—between us.

  I can honestly identify the precise instant I came to like Sonny as a person; as a comrade. He could have repeated his question. He could have allowed the silence to drag on, which would have been another way of insisting on a response. To his everlasting credit he shrugged. “I suppose I shall have to make do with an educated guess” is what he said.

  I continued my pitch. “You came down from Cambridge—this alone will open doors for you in journalism, in the foreign service, even in His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. I am proposing that you hitch your star to the Bolshevik project of imposing proletarian order on capitalist chaos. Will you join us in the struggle against Hitlerism and international Fascism?”

  “You should know that I am terrified of violence. I get sick to my stomach at the sight of b-blood.”

  “Who amongst us isn’t terrified of violence?”

  “You don’t understand. I tell you frankly, I am not courageous. If I were to be threatened with torture I would admit everything. I would name names. Yours first. I would die of fright if I were to be arrested.”

  “Being arrested can be a marvelously liberating experience. It liberates you from the fear of being arrested.”

  Sonny looked at me intently. “You are speaking from experience, aren’t you?”

  I was speaking about the marvelously liberating experience of my predecessor, of course, but I couldn’t tell Sonny that. Ignaty Reif, cryptonym Marr, had lived in dread of being arrested by the NKVD. His hand had been shaking when he showed me the telegram from Moscow Centre summoning him home for consultations. “Don’t go, for God’s sake,” I had whispered. We were in the men’s room of a public house at the time, urinating into adjacent urinals. “I am a loyal Stalinist,” he had whispered back. “Not going would only confirm their suspicions, assuming they have any.” A month after his return to Russia, Ignaty managed to send a note to me through the wife of a cipher clerk who happened to be his wife’s sister’s niece. Being arrested is a marvelously liberating experience, it said. It liberates you from the fear of being arrested. The note was unsigned but I recognized my friend’s handwriting. The telegram from Moscow Centre that announced my promotion to Rezident also informed us that Ignaty Reif had been sentenced to the highest measure of punishment and shot as a German spy.

  Ignaty, with his round Polish face and his Polish accent and his shiny Russian suits that were one size too large for his squat Polish body, loathed everything German, starting with the language and finishing with Adolf Hitler and his thousand-year Reich.

  What I told Sonny, in response to his question, was: “I am speaking from the long and painful Russian experience under the Tsars.”

  “Stalin is said to arrest people in great numbers,” he remarked.

  “Don’t believe everything you read in the capitalist press,” I cautioned. “Comrade Stalin only causes guilty people to be arrested.” I tried to steer the conversation onto safer ground. “Listen, Kim, if you were to be in any danger, we would exfiltrate you well before you could be arrested.”

  “To where?”

  “Why, to the Soviet Union, of course.”

  “I have never been to the Soviet Union.”

  “You would like it.” I smiled. “It would like you.”

  I saw him nodding with what can only be described as eagerness. He never hesitated. “Yes,” he said.

  I was taken aback. I had expected him to put additional questions, to seek clarifications that I was under strict instructions not to provide. “Yes?” I asked a bit incredulously. “You agree to my proposition?”

  He laughed. “To be honest I am not quite sure what you are p-proposing, but I am not your belt-and-braces type. I agree.”

  I took his hand and we shook on an understanding that would change his life.

  And mine.

  4: LONDON, JULY 1934

  Where the Hajj Admits to Having Something Up His Sleeve

  You won’t recognize my name. Good Lord, why would you know who Miss Evelyn Sinclair is? I’m nobody. I’m here because I am the daughter of somebody, which is to say somebody important. My father, Hugh Sinclair, Admiral of His Majesty’s Fleet (retired), is the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Father, bless his heart, is old school down to his Savile gaiters. He has a mania for secrecy. He communicates with the handful of agents he has by means of what intelligence professionals curiously refer to as dead letterboxes. (How in heaven’s name does one kill a letter?) If Father is under the weather or otherwise indisposed, he has me service these postal boxes. Mind you, I am not actually a paid staff member of SIS but as we are starved for funds by our masters in the Foreign Office, this saves a salary. Father, universally known as Quex because of the speed with which he was thought to carry out orders when he was in the navy, takes his mania for secrecy to extremes. He keeps the service records of agents and staff in his breast pocket, one index card per person. He has been known to sit with his back to the individual he is interviewing in order to conceal his features. It was only because he and the Hajj (which is what Father has called St John Philby since this bedraggled, bearded Arabist converted to Islam) had been school chums at Westminister and Trinity that he consented to be seated facing him. The particular meeting I am recounting took place in an upper-floor parlor of Caxton House, the dilapidated building within walking distance of Victoria Rail Station that reeked of midnight oil and served SIS as an H.Q. Thick curtains had been drawn across the windows, blotting up any suggestion of daylight. Portraits of Wellington’s pink-jowled generals, each illuminated by a small brass lighting fixture, leaned off the walls as if to eavesdrop on the conversation. A carafe filled with a decent claret and four glasses had been set out on a silver tray. Besides the Hajj and Father, there were two others (I don’t include myself) present: Father’s deputies, Colonel Valentine Vivian, who had known Philby back in India before the First War, and Colonel Stewart Menzies, a Horse Guard thought by the very few not put off by an absence of evidence to be the bastard of Edward VII. (Dear Colonel Menzies has been known to get in a huff if one didn’t employ the Scottish pronunciation of his name, which was Miniz.) What set Father’s two deputies apart was that they loathed each other. None of the Caxton House regulars could recall having seen them speaking to one another; they communicated through memoranda
that were routinely burned in ashtrays, some, so it was rumored about, before being read. Father liked the atmosphere this created. Kept the troops on the qui vive, he would say. I was, as usual, present to create a stenographic minute of the conversation—it has been said of me, with some justice, that I am the Secret Intelligence Service’s institutional memory. No glass had been set for me. Just as well. I am a lifelong teetotaler, not to mention co-chairlady of the Camden Temperance Society. Three minutes before the hour St John (pronounced Sin-Jin) Philby materialized at the door. He was wearing a wrinkled white suit with food stains visible on the lapels and white tennis runners. Immediately after he sat down he undid the laces. “Able to trek desert dunes weeks on end,” he muttered. “Damned feet swell up after five minutes in this asphalt jungle of yours.”

  Perhaps a word about the Hajj would be in order: To his everlasting vexation he lived in the shadow of T. E. Lawrence—our Lawrence of Arabia, as the yellow journalists would have it. Both Philby and Lawrence had contributed to the routing of the Ottoman horde from Arabia and Palestine. Lawrence in particular had captured the popular imagination when he sweet-talked Sharif Hussain of Mecca into rebelling against the Turks, eventually driving them north through Sinai and Syria. In part because of arguments advanced by Lawrence (in some cases quite shamelessly in newspaper interviews), the Sharif’s son, Faisal, was crowned king in Damascus in 1920. Lawrence wanted to go whole hog and install princes of the House of Hashim on thrones in Iraq and Transjordan, and the FO came to see things his way. Philby thought Lawrence had got it bass-ackward (to use the polite version of one of Father’s saltier expressions). The Hajj argued that the British were betting on the wrong horse; that they should be putting their money on ibn Saud and his Wahabi nomads in the Arabian desert, who were living in tents atop an ocean of petroleum. “Factories that run on coal are switching to petroleum,” the Hajj would tell Father, his only-just-kempt beard quivering with aggravation. “Am I wrong in thinking the keels being laid down now are going to be propelled by bunker oil?”

  “I am afraid that is a state secret,” Father would reply evenly. “If I were to tell you, old boy, I should have to kill you.”

  At the time St John Philby had rewarded Father’s rare stab at humor with a weak smile. As I recall the scene, I seem to remember Father shrugging amiably. In the quarrel between the two rats of the desert, Philby and Lawrence, Quex was never quite sure his Trinity chum hadn’t gotten it right.

  As concerns the meeting at hand: Once the social amenities were out of the way, Colonel Vivian, who tended the counterintelligence portfolio in Father’s shop, tapped Philby on a kneecap. “You will probably have heard,” he said.

  “I caught a glimpse of the headlines coming through Victoria,” Philby replied. “Do you know more than what’s in the newspapers?”

  Father said, “It is Valentine’s brief to know more than they print in the papers.”

  “He makes half of it up,” Colonel Menzies interjected under his breath.

  It was never difficult to get Colonel Vivian’s goat. “I shall carry on as if I hadn’t heard that,” he said, but he had heard it and the register of his voice was not quite the same. “Ten Austrian Nazis from SS Regiment 89 were behind yesterday’s assassination of Dollfuss. They talked their way into the Chancellery building and shot him dead when he rose to his feet to greet them. It was, of course, an attempt at a putsch. Herr Hitler will certainly have been behind it. The assassins were apprehended by the Austrian gendarmerie. I have it on good authority the scoundrels are to be shot. It was thanks to the Heimwehr militia units, which remained loyal to the government and attacked the Nazi formations before they could launch the coup d’état, that the plot failed.”

  “Wasn’t that boy of yours prowling Vienna?” Father asked Philby.

  “Dashed off to Austria to polish his German after he came down from Cambridge. Made a beeline for Britannia straightaway Dollfuss crushed those Communist riots last February.”

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Kim.”

  “That’s it. Kim. After Kipling’s Kim, if memory serves.”

  “Yes.”

  “Expect him to become a spy like Kipling’s Kim, do you?”

  “I can think of worse fates.”

  Father opined, “I can’t.” Colonels Vivian and Menzies laughed appreciatively. Father continued, “Your boy was smart to return to England. In my view, a failed putsch or two won’t stop Hitler from seizing Austria.”

  Philby said, “Great Britain is making the colossal mistake of seeing Hitler as the principal adversary.”

  “Have you had occasion to read Mein Kampf?” Colonel Vivian inquired of Philby.

  “Have you had occasion to read the terms of the Versailles treaty?” Philby retorted. “What could be more normal than the Germans wanting to rearm, to take their rightful place in Europe. Austria is their backyard, their elbow room, as they put it.”

  “The Versailles treaty was the price the Germans had to pay for waging the war,” Colonel Vivian asserted.

  “It was the price they had to pay for losing the war,” Philby insisted.

  “More claret?” Father inquired.

  “I was under the impression Muslims didn’t drink,” Colonel Vivian remarked when the Hajj accepted a refill.

  “There is no prohibition in the holy Koran against consuming alcoholic beverages,” Philby said. He was not to be easily sidetracked. “I make no secret of my exasperation with British foreign policy, Hugh,” he told Father. “I consider it wrongheaded, especially insofar as we flaunt the dreadful Balfour Declaration encouraging the Zionist delusion of returning to Palestine.”

  “You would have us accept this clown Hitler as an equal in Europe?” Colonel Vivian asked. He looked at Father and raised his hands, palms upward, as if he had made the point that clinches an argument.

  “Like it or not, Herr Hitler is an equal,” Philby said. “If the British establishment view him as a clown, it’s because the British press keelhauled the German chancellor with personal ridicule. The British government are every bit as responsible as Herr Hitler for the tension in Europe.”

  “You see no solution?” Father asked. He seemed genuinely bemused by the Hajj’s orneriness. Knowing Father, I suspect he appreciated opinions that had their origins in an eccentric temperament.

  “There would be a solution if the F.O. weren’t too dimwitted to explore it. What is needed is a Christian settlement to the quarrel.”

  “As Christians, oughtn’t we to be concerned about Hitler’s attitude toward Jews?” Colonel Menzies inquired.

  “As a militant anti-Zionist,” the Hajj replied, “I don’t give a hang how Herr Hitler treats his Jews so long he doesn’t pack them off to Palestine. They are, after all, his Jews, Stewart.” Philby looked directly at Father. “The great enemy of Western civilization is not Herr Hitler and Germany, it is Generalissimo Stalin and Soviet Russia.”

  Father said, “I don’t quite see things the way you do, old boy. You are obsessed with Soviet Russia. Have been as far back as Trinity, where I remember your spouting off about that chap Trotsky and his Petrograd Soviet. What year would that have been, Evelyn?”

  “Nineteen oh five, Father.”

  “Oh five, of course. My predecessor at SIS, Smith-Cumming, was obsessed with Communism, too. Tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks after their little palace revolution—damn near succeeded. I’m talking about Bruce Lockhart’s caper, which got us nothing but bad headlines for our troubles. Smith-Cumming devoted a good part of SIS’s extremely limited resources to what he perceived to be the plausible Soviet threat of world revolution. When I took over here after Smith-Cumming met his Maker—damnation, what year would that have been, Evelyn?”

  “Nineteen twenty-three, Father.”

  “That’s it, twenty-three. The inability to recall dates is a symptom of premature dotage, what? I was saying—what was I saying? Ah, yes, that we kept our more or less orthodox espionage efforts directed ag
ainst the Soviets until Herr Hitler appeared center stage. Given F.O. restrictions on our purse strings, not to mention F.O.’s unshakable conviction that Herr Hitler had become our principal adversary, we were obliged to shift gears.”

  “Quite right,” Colonel Vivian said.

  Father didn’t appreciate interruptions. “As I was saying, we were obliged to shift gears, which is to say redirect our resources from Soviet Russia in order to target Fascist Germany.”

  “Quite wrong,” the Hajj said.

  Philby was one of the very few who could cross Father so directly. “How so?” Quex asked pleasantly enough.

  “The future is perceptible to those who are not fearful of gazing into the crystal ball,” the Hajj said. “Europe is heading for another Great War. Soviet Russia, with its limitless manpower, with Stalin’s ruthless thirst for conquest, will emerge from it to dominate Europe. The Soviets, keen to recover lost territories, will dress up old Tsarist appetites in Communist ideology. Revolutionary movements financed and encouraged by the Soviets, and ultimately loyal to the Soviets, will spring up in the most unlikely places. The empire will be at risk. India will be the first to go.”

  Colonel Menzies had been following the exchange attentively. “What would you have us do, St John, that we are not already doing?” he asked.

  “Can we suppose you have something up your sleeve?” Colonel Vivian inquired.

  The Hajj: “Be a damn fool turning up here if I didn’t.”

  Father: “Could you tell us about it?”

  The Hajj: “I shall have to kill you all immediately if I do.”

  I have a marginalia here that reads: General laughter.

  Father: “You haven’t interrupted your exploration of Arabia’s Empty Quarter to hold back on us, old boy. Do spit it out.”