Kim was his father’s pet, and project. Like Claude Elliott, St John Philby was ambitious for his son, but showed him little affection. He moulded him for Westminster and Cambridge, and was proud when his son achieved those goals; but mostly he was absent, charging around the Arab world courting controversy, and searching for celebrity. ‘My ambition is fame, whatever that may mean,’ he said. St John Philby was a notable scholar, linguist and ornithologist, and he did achieve fame of a sort, but might have found more lasting appreciation had he not been so profoundly irritating, wilful and arrogant. He was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth: he never backed down, or listened, or compromised. He was equally swift to give and take offence, and ferociously critical of everyone except himself. He alternately neglected and hectored his wife Dora. He was snobbish, and in many ways conventional, but also instinctively contrarian, forever bucking the system and then complaining furiously when the system failed to reward him. Kim idolised him, and loathed him.
At school, the young Philby was ‘constantly aware of his father’s long shadow’. Alongside his fine academic record, and general popularity, the boy showed a small streak of mendacity, prompting some parental disquiet: ‘He should always be careful to be truthful whatever the consequences,’ observed his father. Kim arrived at Cambridge at the age of seventeen on a history scholarship, having inherited both his father’s intellectual self-confidence, and his determination to swim against the tide.
The violent ideological currents sweeping Cambridge in the 1930s had created a vortex which quickly swept up Philby and many other clever, angry, alienated young men. He made friends on the political left, and some on the extreme left. Fascism was on the march in Europe, and only communism, it seemed to many, could oppose it. Late at night, over copious drinks, in panelled rooms, students argued, debated, tried on one ideological outfit or another, and, in a small handful of cases, embraced violent revolution. The most significant, and certainly the most colourful, of Philby’s radical new friends was Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, amoral, witty, supremely dangerous and loud in his advocacy of communism. Another was Donald Maclean, a clever young linguist destined for the Foreign Office.
Philby joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society. He canvassed on behalf of the Labour Party. But there was no ‘sudden conversion’, no revolutionary epiphany when the religion of communism seized his soul. Instead, the student Philby moved slowly leftwards, and then faster after visiting Berlin in 1933 and witnessing at first hand, like Elliott, the brutality of Nazism during an anti-Jewish rally. Unlike many of his friends, Philby never joined the Communist Party. His beliefs were radical, but simple: the rich had exploited the poor for too long; the only bulwark against fascism was Soviet communism, ‘the inner fortress of the world movement’; capitalism was doomed and crumbling; the British establishment was poisoned by Nazi leanings. ‘I left the university,’ he wrote, ‘with the conviction that my life must be devoted to communism.’ Yet he wore his convictions so lightly they were all but invisible. With the £14 he was awarded for his degree, he bought the collected works of Karl Marx. But there is no evidence he ever studied them in depth, or even read them. Though politics would dictate his life, he was not greatly interested in political theory. As Elliott later observed, ‘I can hardly see him as a lecturer in dialectical materialism.’
Before leaving Cambridge, Philby sought out his supervisor, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and asked him how best he might ‘devote his life to the communist cause’. It was a measure of how deeply Marxism had penetrated the university that Philby felt no danger in asking such a loaded question, and Dobb had no qualms in answering it. Dobb directed him to Louis Gibarti, a Paris agent of the Comintern, the international communist organisation, who in turn furnished an introduction to the Austrian communist underground. It was that easy: the radical left had its own Old Boy network.
In the autumn of 1933, Philby travelled to Vienna, ostensibly to improve his German before applying to join the Foreign Office – in reality to witness, and if possible take part in, the battle between left and right then under way in the Austrian capital. Engelbert Dollfuss, Austria’s extreme right-wing dictator, had already suspended the constitution and outlawed strikes and demonstrations in his efforts to suppress the socialist movement. A full-scale conflict was imminent, and the situation, as Philby put it, was ‘at a crisis point’. Philby made his way to the address provided by Gibarti, and introduced himself to its occupants, Israel and Gisella Kohlman, and their daughter Alice – with whom he promptly fell in love. Alice, known as Litzi, was twenty-three, dark-haired, Jewish, vivacious, direct to the point of bluntness, and newly divorced, having married at eighteen. When Philby met Litzi, he was still a virgin and a political naif; she swiftly attended to both deficiencies. Litzi was a fully committed revolutionary and, according to one contemporary, a ‘tremendous little sexpot’.
Litzi was active in the Viennese communist underground, and in contact with Soviet intelligence. She had spent two weeks in prison for subversive activities. Philby was instantly besotted. They made love in the snow. (‘Actually quite warm, once you get used to it,’ he recalled to a later girlfriend.) Philby had been in Austria for only a few weeks, when Dollfuss moved to crush the Leftists, arresting socialist leaders, banning trades unions and catapulting Austria into a brief but vicious civil war. Philby and Litzi plunged into the fray on behalf of the Revolutionary Socialists, the short-lived alliance of socialists and communists, passing messages, drafting leaflets, and helping to smuggle wanted men and women out of the country. The left was crushed in four days; 1,500 people were arrested, and the socialist leaders were executed. Litzi was on the wanted list, and the police were closing in, but Philby’s British passport would offer her protection: on 24 February 1934, he married Litzi in Vienna Town Hall. This was more than just a marriage made in Marxism; as Mrs Philby she could flee with her new husband to the safety of Britain. Litzi, or ‘Lizzy’ as he called her, may be the only woman to whom Philby remained both ideologically and sexually faithful. ‘Even though the basis of our relationship was political to some extent, I truly loved her and she loved me.’
A few weeks later, the newlyweds arrived in London, where they lodged with Philby’s mother. Conventional Dora Philby, desperate to keep up appearances despite a perennial shortage of money, was not best pleased to find her son married to a foreign communist. She regarded his politics as another passing adolescent phase, like acne. ‘I do hope Kim gets a job to get him off this bloody communism,’ Mrs Philby wrote to her husband in Saudi Arabia. ‘He’s not quite extreme yet, but may become so.’ St John was unconcerned by his son’s radicalism. ‘Excess can always be toned down afterwards,’ he declared.
Just a few weeks after his return from Vienna, Philby sat on a bench in Regent’s Park, waiting to meet a ‘man of decisive importance’ who, Litzi had promised, would change his life. When Philby had asked her who he was, and what made him so important, she clammed up.
Out of the June sunshine appeared a short, stout man in his early thirties with curly fair hair and intelligent eyes. He spoke English with a strong East European accent, and introduced himself as ‘Otto’. Philby never forgot their first conversation. Otto spoke about art and music, his love of Paris and his dislike of London. This, Philby reflected, was a ‘man of considerable cultural background’. Philby was entranced: ‘He was a marvellous man. Simply marvellous. I felt that immediately. The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment.’ That was a quality many found in Philby too. Gradually, their conversation drifted towards politics, and then the works of Marx and Lenin, which Otto seemed to know by heart. Philby, in turn, described his political experiences in Cambridge, his activities in Vienna, and his wish to join the Communist Party. They spoke in euphemisms, with Otto hinting that he could put ‘important and interesting work’ in Philby�
�s direction. As with most espionage relationships, this one began not with politics, but with friendship. ‘I trusted him from the start,’ wrote Philby. ‘It was an amazing conversation.’ They agreed to meet again.
Otto’s real name, which Philby would not learn for decades, was Arnold Deutsch. He was the chief recruiter for Soviet intelligence in Britain, the principal architect of what would later become known as the Cambridge Spy Ring. Born of Czech Jewish parents, Arnold and his family had moved to Austria when he was a child. Prodigiously clever, he emerged from Vienna University after just five years with a doctorate in chemistry, a fervent commitment to communism, and a passionate interest in sex. His first career was as publisher and publicist for the German sexologist Wilhelm Reich – the ‘prophet of the better orgasm’ who sought to bring sexual enlightenment to the prudish Viennese as part of the ‘sex-pol’ (sexual politics) movement, which equated sexual repression with fascist authoritarianism. Reich developed the radical, though slightly implausible, theory that ‘a poor man’s sexual performance led him to fascism’. While promoting Reich’s idea that better sex makes better revolutionaries, Deutsch was also secretly working for Soviet intelligence, having undergone a training course in Moscow. The Gestapo arrested Deutsch briefly in 1933; the anti-pornography section of the Vienna police were also on his trail, on account of his sex-pol activities. A year later, he arrived in Britain, to begin a postgraduate degree in Phonetics and Psychology at University College London, while working as a spy-recruiter. Deutsch had relatives in the UK, notably his wealthy cousin Oscar, the founder of the Odeon cinema chain, which was said to stand for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation’. One Deutsch was doing well out of British capitalism; the other was hellbent on destroying it.
Deutsch was an ‘illegal’, espionage parlance for a spy operating without diplomatic status. His mission was to recruit radical students at the best universities (using his academic work as cover), who might later rise to positions of power and influence. Deutsch was on the hunt for long-term, deep-cover, ideological spies who could blend invisibly into the British establishment – for Soviet intelligence was playing a long game, laying down seed corn that could be harvested many years hence, or left dormant for ever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.
Philby’s introduction to Deutsch appears to have been arranged by Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian communist friend of Litzi’s. Born Edith Suschitzky, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese publisher, Edith married an English doctor and fellow communist named Alexander Tudor-Hart, and moved to England in 1930, where she worked as a photographer and part-time talent-scout for the NKVD, under the remarkably unimaginative codename ‘Edith’. She had been under MI5 surveillance since 1931 but not, fatefully, on the day she led Philby to meet Deutsch in Regent’s Park.
Philby was just the sort of recruit Deutsch was looking for. He was ambitious, well connected and devoted to the cause, but unobtrusively: unlike others, Philby had never made his radical views obvious. He sought a career in diplomacy, journalism or the civil service, all excellent perches for a spy. Deutsch was also under the impression that St John Philby was an agent of British intelligence, with access to important secret material.
At their second meeting, Deutsch asked Philby if he was willing to act as an undercover agent for the communist cause. Philby did not hesitate: ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force,’ he wrote. That was a most telling remark: the attraction of this new role lay in its exclusivity. In some ways, Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join. Westminster School and Cambridge University are elite clubs; MI6 is an even more exclusive fellowship; working secretly for the NKVD within MI6 placed Philby in a club of one, the most elite member of a secret inner ring. ‘Of all the passions,’ wrote Lewis, ‘the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.’
‘My future looked romantic,’ Philby wrote. Deutsch laid out a vision of that future: Philby and Litzi must break off all communist contacts; rather than join the party, he should establish a new political image as a right-winger, even a Nazi-sympathiser. He must become, to all outward appearances, a conventional member of the very class he was committed to opposing. ‘By background, education, appearance and manners you are an intellectual, a bourgeois. You have a marvellous career ahead of you. A bourgeois career,’ Deutsch told him. ‘The anti-fascist movement needs people who can enter into the bourgeoisie.’ Hidden inside the establishment, Philby could aid the revolution in a ‘real and palpable way’. Deutsch began to instruct Philby on the rudiments of tradecraft: how to arrange a meeting; where to leave messages; how to detect if his telephone was bugged; how to spot a tail, and how to lose one. He presented Philby with a new Minox subminiature camera, and taught him how to copy documents. Philby memorised Deutsch’s lessons ‘like poetry’. His double life had begun.
Deutsch gave Philby the affectionate codename ‘Sonny’ (Söhnchen in German), and reported his catch to the London rezident, the regional control officer of the NKVD (the predecessor organisation to the KGB), who passed on the news to Moscow Centre, the Soviet intelligence headquarters: ‘We have recruited the son of an Anglo agent, advisor to Ibn-Saud, Philby.’ Moscow was impressed: ‘What are his prospects for a diplomatic career? Are they realistic? Will he choose his own path or will his father “suggest” he meet someone and discuss it? That would be good.’ Deutsch instructed his new protégé to draw up a list of acquaintances and contemporaries, from Oxford as well as Cambridge, who might also be recruited to the cause. He told him to discreetly explore whatever documents St John Philby kept in his office at home, and to photograph ‘the most interesting’.
Asking Philby to spy on his own father was surely a test of his commitment, and Philby passed it easily. He did what was asked of him without hesitation. Deutsch reported that his new recruit ‘refers to his parents, who are well-to-do bourgeois, and his entire social milieu with unfeigned contempt and hatred’. Philby was doubtless putting on a display of class-warrior zeal for Deutsch, for he was spellbound by his spymaster, ‘his marvellous education, his humanity, his fidelity to building a new society’. They met often, always in ‘the remoter open spaces in London’, and once in Paris. Deutsch flattered and inspired his young ward. When Philby’s relationship with Litzi began to falter, the older man dispensed marital advice. (‘His wife was his first lover in his life,’ Deutsch reported to Moscow, keen, as ever, to establish a link between sex and socialist zeal. ‘When difficulties arose in their relationship, they would confide in me and both followed my advice.’)
Philby was bonded, ideologically and emotionally, to his charismatic Soviet controller. ‘I sometimes felt we had been friends since childhood,’ he wrote. ‘I was certain that my life and myself interested him not so much professionally as on a human level.’ The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated. Deutsch made a careful study of Philby’s psychology, the flashes of insecurity beneath the debonair exterior, the unpredictable stammer, his veiled resentment of a domineering father. Deutsch reported to the Centre that Philby had potential but needed ‘constant encouragement’: ‘Söhnchen comes from a peculiar family. His father is considered at present to be the most distinguished expert on the Arab world . . . he is an ambitious tyrant and wanted to make a great man out of his son.’ Deutsch noted his acolyte’s intellectual curiosity, his fluctuating moods, his old world manners, and his resolve: ‘It’s amazing that such a young man is so widely and deeply knowledgeable . . . He is so s
erious he forgets that he is only twenty-five.’
Deutsch urged Philby to get a job in journalism – ‘Once you’re inside, you’ll look around and then decide which way to go’ – and he reassured Moscow that Philby’s family contacts would ensure swift promotion. ‘He has many friends from the best homes.’ Philby soon obtained a job as a sub-editor at the World Review of Reviews, a literary and political monthly, before moving on to the Anglo-German Trade Gazette, a magazine devoted to improving economic relations between Britain and Germany which was partly financed by the Nazi government. Completing this lurch from extreme left (secretly) to extreme right (publicly), he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a society formed in 1935 to foster closer understanding with Germany. A sump for the forces of appeasement and Nazi admiration, the fellowship included politicians, aristocrats and business leaders, some naive or gullible, others rampantly fascist. With views diametrically opposed to his own, such people offered Philby ideal political camouflage, as well as information, eagerly received in Moscow, about links between the Nazis and their British sympathisers. Philby travelled regularly to Berlin on behalf of the fellowship, and even met the German foreign minister, von Ribbentrop. He later claimed to have found playing the part of a keen young fascist ‘profoundly repulsive’ because ‘in the eyes of my friends, even conservative ones, but honest conservatives, I looked pro-Nazi’. Former friends from the left were aghast at his apparent conversion, and some shunned him. Deutsch commiserated, telling Philby he knew ‘how difficult it is to leave old friends’.
A Spy Among Friends Page 5
