A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  Both men discussed the conversation with Guy Liddell, who wrote in his diary: ‘Kim is extremely worried’. White, for his part, had not found Philby’s answers ‘wholly convincing’. Liddell had been Philby’s friend for twenty years. He knew Guy Burgess well. Anthony Blunt was one of his closest chums. Liddell’s diary betrays a man struggling with the realisation that some, and perhaps all, of his closest friends were spies. ‘I dined with Anthony Blunt,’ he wrote. ‘I feel certain that Blunt was never a conscious collaborator with Burgess in any activities that he may have conducted on behalf of the Comintern.’ His tone was anything but certain. That Burgess and Maclean might be spies, let alone Philby, was ‘hard to believe’. Because he did not want to believe it.

  Two days later, Philby was back in White’s office, where the atmosphere was now several degrees chillier. In the interim, a letter had arrived from CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith, drafted by Bill Harvey, and with his indictment attached. Aggressive in tone, and addressed to C in person, it stated that under no circumstances would Philby be permitted to return to Washington. The underlying message was blunt: ‘Fire Philby or we break off the intelligence relationship.’ The relationship was under strain as never before. Noting that confidence in the Foreign Office had been ‘severely shaken’ by the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, both of whom were obvious security risks, the US urged the British government to ‘clean house regardless of whom may be hurt’. Even more insultingly, Washington suggested that such a security breach would never have happened in the US: ‘In the State Department repeated drunkenness, recurrent nervous breakdowns, sexual deviations and other human frailties are considered security hazards and persons showing any one or more of them are summarily dismissed.’

  As Angleton had predicted, MI6 did not take kindly to having one of its officers accused of treachery without hard evidence, let alone the suggestion that the Foreign Office was staffed with drunken, mentally unstable sexual deviants. The bosses of MI6 immediately sent a message to Dick White at MI5, stating ‘their wholehearted commitment to the protection of their protégé and to the reputation of their service’. White was now facing both a looming confrontation with Philby, and a showdown with MI6 itself. At the same time, the dossier on Philby was growing. Investigations had revealed his left-wing leanings at Cambridge, his marriage to a communist, his subsequent swing to the far right, and the defector Krivitsky’s reference to a Soviet spy working as a journalist in Spain during the Civil War. The Volkov case, the wreckage of Operation Valuable, the Homer investigation and the timing of the Burgess and Maclean defections all seemed to indicate, circumstantially if not definitively, that Philby was guilty. ‘While all the points against him are capable of another explanation their cumulative effect is certainly impressive,’ wrote Liddell. In a mark of the deepening suspicion, Philby was awarded his own codename: Peach. Codenames are supposed to be neutral, but very seldom are. It is tempting to see a hidden meaning in the MI5 codename now attached to Philby, for a peach was a most exotic and enticing fruit in a Britain emaciated by wartime rationing, and ripe for the plucking.

  Dick White was as polite as before, but more pointed. He invited Philby to describe once again, but in more detail, exactly when he had met Burgess, what he knew of his politics, and how they had become friends. Philby was told to take his time. ‘I’m in no particular hurry,’ said White, with a flicker of impatience. A short lie is easy. An extended lie is far harder, as earlier falsehoods overlap, constrain and contradict the lies that follow. Philby admitted that his first wife had been a communist, but insisted that he had ‘subsequently converted her’ and that ‘he himself had never been a communist’. When asked how Maclean might have discovered he was facing arrest, Philby ‘denied emphatically that he had ever discussed Maclean with Burgess’.

  In the midst of a long, rambling answer, White realised, with perfect certainty, that Philby was lying.

  White now switched focus, to 1936, and the first trip to Spain as a correspondent for The Times. Philby was quick to correct him: he had initially gone to Spain as a freelancer, and only later taken a staff job with the newspaper. White’s face grew redder, and his collar tighter. How, then, as an impoverished young man, had Philby found the money to travel to Spain and set himself up as a correspondent? It was, Philby later wrote, a ‘nasty little question’ because, as White plainly suspected, the order to go to Spain, and the money to do so, had been provided by Soviet intelligence. Philby blustered that he had sold his books and gramophone records to finance the trip. This was White’s opportunity to pounce, because just a little more probing would have unpicked that answer: how many books? How many records? Did he sell them for cash? Where were the bank records? Instead, White simply logged Philby’s response as another lie. After several more hours, White rose to his feet, indicating that the session was over. This time, they did not shake hands. Philby left the second interview knowing that he was now a prime suspect in White’s eyes. He remained convinced that MI5 had little hard evidence, probably not enough to prosecute, and almost certainly not enough to convict him. But there was more than enough to make him intolerable to MI5, and unemployable by MI6. White sent a memo to Stewart Menzies, laying out the grounds for suspicion against Philby, and suggesting that MI6 take action as a matter of urgency.

  Philby was in deep danger. The middle-class hounds of MI5 were baying for his upper-class blood. He was cornered, compromised and running out of ammunition. But he still had allies ready to support him, and one in particular whose loyalty remained as solid and unquestioning as it had ever been.

  Nicholas Elliott returned to Britain at the very moment the Philby inquisition was reaching a climax. He now leaped to his friend’s defence with ferocity, alacrity and absolute conviction.

  The timing of Elliott’s recall was probably coincidental. After six successful years as station chief in Switzerland he was due for a promotion, and accepted a new post in London, liaising with the intelligence services of friendly foreign powers. It was a job that required plenty of foreign travel, and fed what Elliott called his ‘insatiable appetite for new places and faces’. But it also gave him the opportunity to devote himself to a task closer to home, and closer to his heart: defending Philby against the accusations swirling around Whitehall. Elliott was wholeheartedly, unwaveringly convinced of Philby’s innocence. They had joined MI6 together, watched cricket together, dined and drunk together. It was simply inconceivable to Elliott that Philby could be a Soviet spy. The Philby he knew never discussed politics. In more than a decade of close friendship, he had never heard Philby utter a word that might be considered left-wing, let alone communist. Philby might have made a mistake, associating with a man like Burgess; he might have dabbled in radical politics at university; he might even have married a communist, and concealed the fact. But these were errors, not crimes. The rest of the so-called evidence was mere hearsay, gossip of the most vicious sort. The anti-communist campaign led by Senator Joe McCarthy was at its height in the United States, and in Elliott’s firm opinion Philby was the victim of a McCarthyite witch-hunt, led by a cabal of lower-class, anti-communist fanatics in MI5.

  The Elliotts moved into a house in Wilton Street in Belgravia, just a few minutes from where Philby was lodging in his mother’s flat in Drayton Gardens. Within MI6, Elliott swiftly emerged as Philby’s most doughty champion, defending him against all accusers and loudly declaring his innocence. Philby was his friend, his mentor, his ally, and in the world inhabited by Nicholas Elliott, that meant he simply could not be a Soviet spy. This was a friendship Elliott prized above all others; he saw MI5’s accusations not just as a test of that bond, but as an assault on the very values of the secret club they had joined in the heat of war. Elliott was standing up for an innocent man, ‘guilty only of an unwise friendship’; and in his own mind, he was also defending his tribe, his culture and his class.

  But Elliott’s resolute defence, and the widespread belief within MI6 that Philby was ‘the victim of uns
ubstantiated conjecture’, could not save his job. With both MI5 and the Americans demanding action, Menzies was left with little choice. C summoned his former protégé. Philby knew what was coming. According to some accounts, he may have offered to quit: ‘I’m no good to you now . . . I think you’d better let me go.’ In Philby’s version of events, C told him, with ‘obvious distress’, that he would have to ask for his resignation. His friendship with Burgess, a Soviet spy, had rendered him useless for further work as an MI6 officer. The mere size of his payoff – £4,000, equivalent to more than £32,000 today – was proof that he was leaving with honour, and the support of his service. Philby could ‘not possibly be a traitor’, Menzies told White. Philby pretended to be sanguine, accepting his role as a scapegoat. But Elliott was furious, and did nothing to hide his belief that a ‘dedicated, loyal officer had been treated abominably on the basis of evidence that was no more than paranoid conspiracy theory’.

  Philby’s glittering career as an MI6 officer was over. He was now unemployed, under suspicion of treason, and under a ‘great black cloud’ of uncertainty. The family crammed into a rented gatehouse in Heronsgate, deep in the Hertfordshire countryside. Philby spent most of his time in the village pub. He knew he was being watched. Every week or so, a policeman appeared in the village and stood around looking conspicuous. The telephone was bugged, and his mail intercepted, as MI5 gathered evidence and watched to see if he would break cover. The eavesdroppers could find no evidence that he was in contact with the Soviets, but plenty to indicate the continuing support of his colleagues in MI6. Knowing who was listening in, Philby carefully maintained his pose as a man forced out of a job he loved, but without bitterness. ‘He said that he had been treated very generously and did not have any recrimination against the old firm.’ Elliott tried to cheer him up by joking about the telephone intercepts: ‘Personally I would be delighted if MI5 were to bug my own telephone because that would ensure that whenever it went wrong – as from time to time it does – it would be quickly repaired.’ Philby may not have found this funny.

  Nicholas Elliott called often: his conversations with both Philby and Aileen were carefully logged and transcribed. One of these, intercepted in August, sent a sharp jolt of alarm through MI5, when Aileen was overheard telling Elliott that Philby had gone sailing with a friend, a City businessman with a yacht moored in Chichester on the south coast. ‘I suppose he is not doing a “dis”?’ Aileen asked Elliott, apparently fearful that her husband might use the boat trip to stage a ‘disappearing act’, like Burgess and Maclean, and slip over to France. Elliott laughingly reassured her that there was no danger whatever of Philby defecting.

  Guy Liddell pondered whether to intercept the sailing party, but concluded that Aileen had only been speaking ‘in jest’. In any case, ‘it was already too late to stop Philby getting onto the yacht and it seemed equally unjustifiable to issue any warning to the French’. Philby returned home that evening, oblivious to the flap he had caused. But as the evidence mounted, so did MI5’s fear that Philby might be planning to make a run for it. In December, the hunters attacked again.

  *

  The trees were bare beside the road into London, as Philby drove south in answer to another summons from C. The inquiry was entering a new season. ‘The case against Philby seems somewhat blacker,’ wrote Liddell. As Philby headed towards the office, he imagined that MI5 must have found more evidence, and that the next few hours might be ‘sticky’. He was right on both counts. Menzies explained apologetically that a ‘judicial inquiry’ had now been launched into the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Would Philby mind terribly going to MI5 headquarters to answer some more questions? It was an order disguised as an invitation. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had personally approved the decision to bring Philby in for questioning again. Philby’s apprehensions were fully realised when he was ushered into a fifth-floor office of Leconfield House, to find a familiar, hefty and distinctly alarming figure awaiting him.

  ‘Hello Buster,’ said Philby.

  Helenus Patrick Joseph Milmo, universally known as ‘Buster’, was a barrister of the old school, aggressive, precise, pompous and ruthless. He had not come by his nickname lightly. He liked to flatten his opponents with a barrage of accusation, delivered in a booming baritone with an air of legal omniscience. Philby had witnessed these demolition tactics at first hand during the war when, as MI5’s legal adviser, Buster Milmo had joined him in breaking down suspected spies held at Camp 020, the secret interrogation centre in Richmond. After the war, Milmo played a starring role for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. He would go on to become a High Court judge. Armed with MI5’s dossier, Milmo intended to break Philby and coerce him, by sheer force of argument, into a confession.

  Philby sat down and, partly to cover his nerves, took out his pipe and lit it. Milmo instantly told him to put it out, with a sharp reminder that this was a formal judicial inquiry, equivalent to a court of law. This was untrue: the interview had no legal standing, but the exchange set the tone for what followed. Milmo came out with all guns blazing. He accused Philby of spying for the Soviets since the 1930s, sending hundreds to their deaths, betraying Volkov, and tipping off Burgess and Maclean. Philby parried, deflecting and ducking. Milmo then fired his best shot: he revealed that the volume of radio traffic between London and Moscow had jumped dramatically after Volkov’s offer to defect, suggesting a tip-off to Moscow Centre, followed by a similar leap in traffic between Moscow and Istanbul. How did Philby account for this?

  Philby shrugged. ‘How would I know?’

  Milmo moved on to Krivitsky’s report of the mysterious Soviet spy sent under journalistic cover to Civil War Spain with a mission to assassinate Franco.

  ‘Who was that young journalist?’ Milmo demanded. ‘Was it you?’

  Philby replied that if the Soviets had really wanted to kill Franco, they would surely have used a professional hitman, not a Cambridge graduate who had never fired a gun. Frustrated, Milmo now overplayed his hand, accusing Philby of handing sensitive papers to Burgess, a charge Philby could refute without even lying.

  Milmo next accused Philby of marrying a communist, and smuggling her into Britain. Philby countered that if he had left his Jewish girlfriend in Vienna she would have wound up in a Nazi concentration camp. ‘How could I not help her?’

  The lawyer was running out of ammunition. At each evasion, Milmo’s voice grew louder, his face redder, his manner more bellicose. He banged the table. He snorted in disbelief. He flapped and thrashed.

  A stenographer took down every word. In the next room, a posse of senior intelligence officers, including Dick White, Guy Liddell and Stewart Menzies, listened glumly as Milmo grew more enraged, and more ineffectual. ‘So far, he has admitted nothing,’ Liddell recorded in his diary. ‘Milmo is bearing down on him pretty heavily.’

  ‘It all became a shouting match,’ said White.

  After four hours Milmo was hoarse, Philby was exhausted, and the interrogation had ended in stalemate. Milmo knew Philby was guilty. Philby knew he knew, but he also knew that without a confession, the accusations were legally toothless. ‘The interrogation of Philby has been completed without admission,’ wrote Liddell that evening, ‘although Milmo is firmly of the opinion that he is or has been a Russian agent, and that he was responsible for the leakage about Maclean and Burgess.’ Before leaving MI5 headquarters, Philby was asked to surrender his passport, which he happily did, reflecting that if he needed to flee he would be travelling on false papers provided by his Soviet friends.

  ‘I find myself unable to avoid the conclusion that Philby is and has been for many years a Soviet agent,’ Milmo wrote. To White he was even blunter. ‘There’s no hope of a confession, but he’s as guilty as hell.’ Reviewing the tapes and the transcript of the Milmo interview, Guy Liddell conceded that Philby, his esteemed former colleague and friend, had failed to behave like a man unjustly accused. ‘Philby’s attitude throughout wa
s quite extraordinary. He never made any violent protestation of innocence, nor did he make any attempt to prove his case.’ But without new, firm evidence, Liddell wrote, Philby ‘had all the cards in his hands’. And if Philby was guilty, what of the other friends they shared? What of his good friend Anthony Blunt, who had known both Burgess and Philby? What of Tomás Harris, another former MI5 man, whose home had been the scene of so many well-oiled get-togethers? Fissures of doubt began to creep through the intelligence establishment, as its senior figures eyed one another, and wondered.

  Philby described his four-hour grilling to Elliott, angrily insisting that he had been lured into a legal trap. Outraged on his friend’s behalf, Elliott complained to Malcolm Cumming, a senior MI5 officer and one of the few Etonians in the Security Service.

  Nicholas Elliott again referred to PEACH’s intense anger with MI5 over the Milmo interrogation. He said that PEACH did not in any way object to such an independent interrogation being carried out but he did resent the fact that after his friendly conversations with Dick White, he should be virtually enticed to London under false pretences and then thrown straight into what proved to be a formal inquiry at which even his request to smoke was refused.