A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  As Philby’s advocate, Elliott was determined to extract an apology for the way the interrogation had been handled. MI6 was ‘counter-attacking’, Liddell recorded gloomily, and Elliott was leading the charge.

  MI5 was still determined to extract an admission of guilt from Philby, and now turned to a man who was, in almost every conceivable way, the polar opposite of Buster Milmo. William ‘Jim’ Skardon, a former detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police, was Watcher-in-Chief, head of the surveillance section A4, and by repute the ‘foremost exponent in the country’ in the art of interrogation. Skardon was mild and unassuming in manner; he wore a trilby, a raincoat, an apologetic expression and a damp moustache. He spoke in a sibilant, self-effacing whisper, and seldom made eye contact. Where Milmo relied on intimidation and noise, Skardon wormed his way into a man’s mind by guile and insinuation. He had successfully extracted a confession in January 1950 from Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy, winning his confidence during long walks in the country and quiet chats in rural pubs. Skardon uncovered truth by increments, asking what seemed to be the same questions, subtly varied, again and again, until his target tripped and became enmeshed in his own lies. Philby knew a great deal about Skardon, and his reputation. So when this stooped, unctuous, bland-seeming man knocked on his door in Heronsgate and asked if he might come in for a cup of tea, Philby knew he was still in the deepest water.

  As both men sucked on their pipes, Skardon seemed to wander, rather vaguely, from one subject to another, with a ‘manner verging on the exquisite’. Afterwards, Philby thought he had spotted, and side-stepped, ‘two little traps’, but wondered anxiously if there had been others he had failed to detect. ‘Nothing could have been more flattering than the cosy warmth of his interest in my views and actions.’ Skardon reported back to Guy Liddell that his mind ‘remained open’ on the issue of Philby’s guilt. This was the first of several visits Skardon would pay to Kim Philby over the coming months, as he probed and prodded, humble, polite, ingenious and relentless. Then, in January 1952, as abruptly as they had started, Skardon’s interviews ceased, leaving Philby ‘hanging’, wondering just how much the detective had detected. ‘I would have given a great deal to have glimpsed his summing up,’ he wrote. In fact, Skardon’s final report proved that the Philby charm had outlasted Skardon’s bogus bonhomie. The interrogator admitted that the hours with Philby had left him with ‘a much more favourable impression than I would have expected’. The charges against Philby were ‘unproven’, Skardon concluded. His passport was returned.

  ‘Investigation will continue and one day final proof of guilt . . . may be obtained,’ MI5 reported. ‘For all practical purposes it should be assumed that Philby was a Soviet spy throughout his service with SIS.’ MI6 sharply disagreed: ‘We feel that the case against Philby is not proven, and moreover is capable of a less sinister interpretation than is implied by the bare evidence.’ And that is how the strange case of Kim Philby remained, for months, and then years, a bubbling unsolved mystery, still entirely unknown to the public, but the source of poisonous discord between the intelligence services. Philby was left in limbo, suspended between the suspicions of his detractors and the loyalty of his friends. Most of the senior officers in MI5 were now convinced that he was guilty, but could not prove it; most of his former colleagues in MI6 remained equally certain of his innocence, but were again unable to find the evidence to exonerate him. There were some in MI5, like Guy Liddell, who clung to the hope that it might all turn out to be a ghastly mistake, and that Philby would eventually be cleared of suspicion; just as there were some in MI6 who harboured doubts about their former colleague, albeit silently, for the sake of the service.

  But among those convinced of Philby’s guilt was one who knew him better than anyone else, and who was finding it ever harder to remain silent; and that was his wife.

  See Notes on Chapter 11

  12

  The Robber Barons

  When did Aileen Philby, the former store detective, uncover the clues that proved her husband, the Foreign Office high-flier, the doting father, the establishment paragon, was a Soviet spy? Was it when he was summoned home, and lost his job? Or did the appalling realisation come earlier? Did she always suspect there was something fishy about Guy Burgess, her bête noir, who trailed after her husband first to Istanbul, and then Washington? Did the penny drop after Philby locked himself in the basement the day after Burgess’s defection, and then drove away with a mysterious bundle and the garden trowel? Or did doubt dawn earlier still, when Philby refused to divorce his first wife, an Austrian communist?

  By 1952, Aileen knew that her husband had lied to her, consistently and coldly, from the moment they first met, and throughout their marriage. The knowledge of his duplicity tipped her into a psychological abyss from which she would never fully emerge. She confronted Kim, who denied everything. The ensuing row, far from dissipating her fears, merely confirmed her conviction that he was lying. To others, she began to hint obliquely at her inner turmoil: ‘To whom should a wife’s allegiance belong?’ she asked a friend. ‘Her country or her husband?’ Questioned by a drunken Tommy Harris at a dinner party, she admitted she was ‘suspicious’ of her husband, but then backtracked and proclaimed him ‘entirely innocent’.

  She probably confided in her friend Flora Solomon, who cannot have been wholly surprised since Philby had attempted to recruit her as a Soviet agent back in 1936. Aileen certainly shared her fears with Nicholas Elliott, who blithely laughed off her suspicions. MI5 had assumed that Aileen was joking when she told Elliott that Philby might ‘do a “dis”’. She wasn’t. She lived in fear that he would defect and join his horrible friend Burgess in Moscow, leaving her with five young children and the perpetual shame of having married a traitor. Each time he left the house, she wondered if he would ever return. She threatened to start legal proceedings to gain custody of the children. She began drinking heavily again. Her grip on reality began to slip.

  One day Elliott received a telephone call from Aileen, tearful and slurring.

  ‘Kim’s gone.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Elliott.

  ‘I think to Russia.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I got a telegram from Kim.’

  At this, even Elliott’s granite loyalty wavered for a moment.

  ‘What does the telegram say?’ he asked, staggered.

  ‘It says: “Farewell forever. Love to the Children”.’

  Reeling, Elliott called the duty officer at MI5. An alert was immediately sent out to sea ports and airports, with instructions to intercept Philby if he attempted to leave the country.

  Oddly, when asked to produce the telegram, Aileen said she could not, saying it had been read to her over the telephone. Puzzled, Elliott made an inquiry at the Post Office, but could find no trace of a telegram sent to Aileen Philby. Once again, he rang the house in Hertfordshire. It was now late evening. This time, Philby answered. At the sound of his familiar voice, Elliott felt a flood of relief.

  ‘Thank God it’s you at last.’

  ‘Who were you expecting it to be?’ said Philby.

  ‘I’m glad you’re home.’

  ‘Where else would I be at night?’

  ‘The next time I see you I’ll tell you where else you could have been tonight,’ said Elliott, with a brittle laugh, and rang off.

  Aileen had fabricated the entire episode, just as she had invented the story of being attacked in Istanbul, and staged her various maladies and injuries over the years. Elliott was fond and protective of Aileen, but he had become only too familiar with her mental illness. She suffered another series of ‘accidents’, and drove her car into the front of a shop. Her doctor sent her for psychiatric treatment. Philby told his friends that Aileen was ‘insane’. So far from alerting Elliott to the truth, Aileen’s behaviour redoubled his sympathy for his beleaguered friend, not only unjustly accused and deprived of his job, but now under attack from a wife who was plainly imagining things. Withi
n MI6, Aileen’s suspicions were dismissed as the paranoid ravings of a madwoman.

  With five children, one unstable wife and two major drinking habits to support, Philby needed money, but employment was hard to find for a man in his forties, who had ostensibly worked for the Foreign Office, but could not explain why he had left. He toyed with resuming his career in journalism, and submitted a number of articles to newspapers, but could find no permanent position. The telephone intercepts ‘disclosed very definitely that Philby was very active in looking for a job’, and failing. Finally, Jack Ivens, a ‘loyal ex-colleague’ from Section V, found him a job in his import-export firm. The salary was a meagre £600 a year. Aileen’s mother provided funds for the family to move into a large and ugly Edwardian house in Crowborough, ‘the poor man’s Surrey’ in Graham Greene’s words. Philby commuted, miserably, to an office in London, where he filled out paperwork, importing Spanish oranges and exporting castor oil to the US. He did not dare try to re-establish contact with his Soviet controllers. ‘Philby was under constant watch,’ wrote Yuri Modin. ‘Several times our counter-surveillance teams reported the presence of MI5 agents hovering in his vicinity.’ He was out in the cold as never before.

  Philby had always been a high-functioning, sociable alcoholic. He was fast becoming an ill-functioning one, with a vile temper. MI5, listening in on his telephone line, noted that ‘Peach is apt to get blind drunk and behave abominably to his best friends.’ Long-suffering and loyal, Elliott put up with Philby’s outbursts. Philby leaned heavily on his old friend. In his strange double world, there was no contradiction here: he genuinely valued Elliott’s friendship, needed his support and relied on his advice, while lying to him. Philby did not disguise from Elliott his collapsing marriage but the subject was only ever tackled obliquely. Like most Englishmen of their class, they tended to steer around embarrassing emotional topics.

  Elliott lent Philby money when funds ran low, paid his club bills, and took him to watch the cricket at Lord’s. He urged Philby to go on the offensive: ‘You must fight like hell. If I was accused of spying, I would go to the Prime Minister and complain,’ he told him. Philby ‘smiled wanly’ at this suggestion. ‘The whole family went through a bad time,’ wrote Elliott, who tried to buoy up his friend by insisting that his exile from MI6 was strictly temporary; Philby would soon be back in the club, and resuming his career where he had left off.

  Sir Stewart Menzies was also firm in his support. On 1 April 1952, he took Philby to dinner at the Travellers’ Club, and asked him ‘whether he wished for any advance of the bonus that was given to him at the time of his resignation’. C later discussed this lunch with Guy Liddell of MI5, who reported:

  C seemed to have reached the conclusion that Kim was innocent. I said that I had come to the conclusion that the only thing to do in cases of this kind, where one knew an individual fairly intimately, was to sink one’s personal view and allow those concerned to get on with the job, purely on the basis of ascertainment of facts. Otherwise one was liable to get misled . . . Kim does not, apparently, bear any particular resentment against this department. If he had been in our position he would have reacted in the same way, even down to the question of withholding his passport.

  Elliott’s conviction that his friend would soon return to the MI6 fold was echoed by Philby’s main ally in the US. James Angleton assured a colleague in 1952 that ‘Philby would recover from his present predicament and would yet become chief of the British Secret Service.’ Philby knew that would never be. Cut off from his Soviet handlers, stuck in an ill-paid job he loathed, expecting MI5 to pounce at any moment, living with a wife who knew his secret, Philby’s life was spiralling downwards.

  Elliott did what he could to bolster Philby’s flagging spirits, dispensing encouragement and support. MI5, combing through the transcripts of Philby’s bugged telephone, expressed surprise and irritation at ‘the extent to which Peach is still in touch with, and subsidised by, MI6’. Philby’s oldest son John was now eleven, and though Philby himself might be committed to destroying the British establishment he was nonetheless anxious to get his sons into a good public school. Eton and Westminster were beyond his budget, but Elliott came up with the solution. He approached his father Claude (now Provost of Eton) who agreed to get John Philby (and later his brother Tommy) into Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire, ‘of which he was governor and which, being heavily endowed, was not too expensive’. The old school tie was still pulling Philby along.

  Elliott closely monitored the progress of the Philby case; or rather the lack of it, for the tussle between MI5 and MI6 had settled into acrimonious stalemate. Ronnie Reed, an MI5 officer who had known Philby from the war, noted ‘the intense disagreement between our two services on Philby’. In June 1952, Stewart Menzies retired, to be replaced by his deputy, Major General Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, a tall, military traditionalist, set in his ways. (His lunch never varied: one grilled herring and a glass of water.) Sinclair was just as determined as his predecessor to stand by Philby: the new C ‘refused to let one of his chaps down’. He did, however, agree that serving MI6 officers should be discouraged from socialising with Philby, a directive which Elliott and others simply ignored. MI5, meanwhile, continued to dig for evidence, convinced that other moles must be lurking inside the establishment, and enraged at the way MI6 had closed ranks. The Watchers listened and observed, waiting for Philby to make a slip.

  MI5’s telephone intercepts would eventually fill thirty-three volumes: they revealed no espionage on Philby’s part, but laid bare the rapidly worsening state of his marriage. He had started an affair with a woman in London, a civil servant, and frequently did not return home for days at a time. When he did, the couple fought bitterly. Philby took to sleeping in a tent in the garden. He told friends that Aileen had denounced him to the Foreign Office, and this had prevented him from getting a decent job. He even claimed she had tried to kill him. Aileen likewise suspected Philby of harbouring murderous designs. Secretly and unethically, her psychiatrist was passing information to MI5. One report noted: ‘In [Aileen’s] opinion, and that of her psychiatrist, Philby had by a kind of mental cruelty to her “done his best to make her commit suicide”.’ The same psychiatrist suggested that Philby might be homosexual, despite copious evidence to the contrary. With little money coming in from her estranged husband, Aileen was reduced to working in the kitchen of a grand house on Eaton Square, simply to pay the bills. Nicholas Elliott tried to shore her up, with financial and moral support. Her workplace, he wrote, ‘was close enough to our house in Wilton Street to spend her off-duty hours with us’.

  After eighteen unhappy months selling castor oil and oranges, Philby found himself jobless again after Jack Ivens’s import-export firm went bust. He scratched around, trying to make a living from freelance journalism, but with scant success. He was now virtually dependent on friends and family. His father, living in Saudi Arabia as an adviser to Ibn Saud, sent what money he could spare. Elliott paid the school fees of the Philby children. Tommy Harris arranged for Philby to write a book about the Spanish Civil War for a London publisher with a £600 advance. The book was never written, and the deal appears to have been a ruse by the wealthy Harris to funnel money to his friend without Philby discovering the source.

  Philby continued to socialise with his friends in intelligence, but tensely. One evening Guy Liddell went to dinner with Tommy Harris, and discovered that Philby had been invited too. He greeted Philby ‘in the normal way’, although both knew the situation could hardly have been stranger. MI5 was convinced of Philby’s treachery; Harris himself was now under suspicion, his telephone bugged in case some clue emerged during his conversations with Philby. The dinner guests all tried to pretend that the occasion was no different from the many that had preceded it. Philby seemed ‘somewhat worried’, Liddell wrote in his diary, and left early.

  In his darkest moments, Philby considered whether to reactivate his escape plan and defect to Moscow, but there was no way
to contact Soviet intelligence without alerting MI5, and he knew it. He was trapped and isolated, aware that he was still just one Soviet defector away from exposure.

  *

  Vladimir Petrov was a Siberian peasant who, through hard work and docile obedience, had survived Stalin’s purges to rise steadily through the ranks of Soviet intelligence. After three decades of service to communism, he was a KGB colonel, and the rezident at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Publicly, Petrov was a time-server; privately, he was a rebel. He had seen his Siberian village destroyed by famine and forced collectivisation. From his work as a cipher clerk, he had learned the full extent of Stalin’s crimes. In August 1954, he defected in Australia. His wife Evdokia was picked up by a KGB snatch squad before she could do the same, and then rescued as her captors tried to manhandle her, missing one shoe, aboard a plane in Darwin.

  As the highest-ranking defector since the war, Petrov brought a mass of information, on ciphers, agent networks, and the names of some 600 KGB officers working as diplomats around the world. He also furnished the first hard evidence that Burgess and Maclean were indeed in the Soviet Union (hitherto this had been assumed, but unverified), and living in Kuibyshev. Even more explosively, he confirmed that they had been tipped off to escape by another British official, a third man. In Whitehall, Fleet Street and beyond, the identity of this shadowy Third Man became the subject of rumour, innuendo and some highly informed speculation.

  Philby heard of Petrov’s defection, and waited anxiously for Jim Skardon to reappear on his doorstep, this time with a police posse and arrest warrant. As the weeks passed without a knock on his door, he assumed, rightly, that the defector had not identified him by name. But he was haunted by the ‘worry that Petrov had brought in something substantial that I did not know about’, which might be used to trip him up if he was interrogated again.