A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  Dick White, Philby’s old adversary, was planning precisely such an entrapment, having now taken over as director general of MI5. Guy Liddell had expected to get the post, but his friendships had damaged his reputation beyond repair. MI6 even hinted that Liddell himself might be a gay Soviet spy, pointing out that he ‘had parted from his wife, had a faintly homosexual air about him and, during the war, had been a close friend of Burgess, Philby and Blunt’. Bitterly disappointed, Liddell heartily congratulated White on his appointment, and resigned.

  White saw the Petrov defection as an opportunity to flush out Philby once and for all, and he urged Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, to put the revelations about a Third Man out in the open. ‘It will undermine Philby. It will create uncertainty for Philby. We’ll lure him into a new interview and try again to get a confession.’ Eden refused, in part because Sir John Sinclair at MI6 insisted White was ‘pursuing a vendetta against Philby that was best ignored’. The feud between MI5 and MI6 was as fierce and damaging as ever.

  Philby could not know it, but his Soviet masters were observing him, and worried. An assessment drawn up by the KGB British section reported that Agent Stanley was ‘desperately short of cash’ and drinking heavily. Yuri Modin asked Moscow what to do, pointing out that Philby had ‘rendered us immense services [and] might need to be reactivated in the future’. The Centre ordered that Philby be given ‘a large sum of money’, and a reassurance that the Soviet Union would stand by him. The KGB was not acting out of generosity, or even loyalty, but hard-headed pragmatism: a drunken and destitute spy was a liability, who might confess, or demand to be extricated. A lump of cash would keep him stable, it was hoped, and in place. But the handover (like most of Moscow’s directives) was easier ordered than done, since Philby was still under close surveillance. Moreover, Modin was instructed not to make direct personal contact; his mission was to pay Philby, under the noses of MI5, without actually seeing him. The KGB officer had managed to spirit Burgess and Maclean out of England; but getting Philby to stay put would be rather harder.

  *

  On the evening of 16 June 1954, Professor Anthony Blunt, former MI5 officer, Soviet spy and distinguished art historian, prepared to give a lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, of which he was a director. The subject was the Arch of Gallienus, a Roman triumphal arch in danger of demolition to make way for a modern housing project. The audience was composed of eager classicists, art students and learned members of the public who had read about the lecture in The Times and wanted to support the worthy cause of protecting Rome’s classical heritage. In the front row, facing the lectern, sat a squarely-built, fair-haired young man who had signed the visitors’ book in the name Greenglass, and identified himself as Norwegian.

  Blunt’s long, baggy face wore an expression of scholarly concern as he distributed photographs of the threatened arch, before launching into an attack on the ‘villainous Italian authorities’ who wanted to do away with it. At the end, everyone clapped, and none more enthusiastically than Greenglass – although he had never been to Italy, knew nothing about classical architecture and could not have cared less if every arch in Rome was bulldozed and covered over in concrete. At the end of the lecture, Professor Blunt was mobbed, as he often was, by a bevy of enthusiastic, upholstered ladies keen to talk about art, who ‘vied with one another in showing off their knowledge’. Greenglass hung back on the fringes, and then, rather abruptly, barged through the throng, elbowing one of the professor’s admirers in the ribs as he did so, and thrust a postcard of a Renaissance painting into Blunt’s hand.

  ‘Excuse me,’ asked the rude Norwegian. ‘Do you know where I can find this picture?’

  Blunt turned the postcard over, while the artistic ladies looked on frostily. On the back was written: ‘Tomorrow. 8 p.m. Angel’. The distinctive handwriting, Blunt knew at once, was that of Guy Burgess.

  Blunt gave his questioner ‘a long stare’, and recognised him as Yuri Modin, the Soviet spy handler he had last seen in 1951, just before Burgess and Maclean fled. Then he looked back at the postcard and its message. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Yes.’

  The next evening Blunt and Modin met in the Angel pub in Islington off the Caledonian Road, a nondescript drinking hole they had used for clandestine meetings in the past. They spoke first about Blunt’s situation – he had been interviewed by MI5, but did not yet seem to be a suspect – before moving on to Philby. Blunt reported that his fellow spy was in poor shape, jobless and penniless, and had already been subjected to a number of hostile interviews by MI5. Modin asked Blunt to pass on some cash to Philby. Reluctantly – for he had long ago forsaken espionage in favour of protecting Roman arches – Blunt agreed.

  A few days later, Philby drove from Crowborough to Tonbridge, and bought a ticket for the first train to London. He waited until all the other passengers were aboard and the platform was deserted before boarding. At Vauxhall, he took the Underground to Tottenham Court Road, where he purchased a large coat and hat. For an hour, he wandered around, looking in shop windows to see if he was being followed, then had a drink in a bar, before buying a cinema ticket. He took a seat in the back row. Halfway through the performance, he slipped out. No one seemed to follow him. But for two more hours he walked aimlessly, then hopped on a bus, then jumped off again. By evening, he was in North London: ‘I was virtually certain I was clean.’

  At dusk, three spies converged on a small square off the Caledonian Road. It appears that Modin, following orders, made no direct contact with Philby that night and spoke only to Blunt as he passed over the package, while Philby kept his distance, ready to run. In Modin’s melodramatic recollection, ‘the dark silhouette kept pace with us along the tree-lined path; a solid, foursquare figure, shrouded in an overcoat’. Philby returned to Crowborough with £5,000 in cash and a ‘refreshed spirit’, buoyed by the knowledge that he was back in contact with Soviet intelligence after a four-year hiatus. Modin had also passed on a reassurance, through Blunt, that the defector ‘Petrov knew nothing about his career as a Soviet agent’. The handover in the dark London park transformed both Philby’s finances and his state of mind. ‘I was no longer alone.’

  Philby’s Soviet friends had rallied to him; his British friends would now do the same. At around the time of the Petrov defection, a group of officers within MI6, led by Nicholas Elliott, launched a concerted campaign to clear his name.

  Elliott had by now taken up a new post as head of MI6’s London station. Codenamed ‘BIN’ and based in Londonderry House, Victoria, the London station acted, in effect, like any other MI6 outpost, but on British soil, with a staff of twenty officers running intelligence operations against diplomats, businessmen and spies, recruiting agents in foreign embassies, and monitoring the activities of visiting dignitaries. Elliott’s new role enabled him to behave like a spy abroad, but within easy reach of his club.

  By 1954, a distinct faction had emerged within MI6, with considerable influence over the chief, Sir John Sinclair: these were the Young Turks of the intelligence service, men like Elliott who had learned the spy game in the heady days of war when, with sufficient grit and imagination, anything had seemed possible. Inside the service, Elliott and his like were known as the ‘Robber Barons’, swashbuckling types with an acute sense of their own importance and little respect for civilian authority. They believed in covert action, taking risks and, whenever necessary, breaking the rules. Above all, they believed in intelligence as a sort of patriotic religion, a British bulwark against barbarism. George Kennedy Young, a good friend of both Elliott and Philby who would rise to become deputy director of MI6, put into words the creed of this increasingly influential and ambitious group. ‘It is the spy who has been called on to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests,’ Young insisted, with an arrogance that did not bode well.

  Men’s minds are shaped of course by their environments and we spies, although we have our professional mystique, do perhaps
live closer to the realities and hard facts of international relations than other practitioners of government. We are relatively free of the problems of status, of precedence, departmental attitudes and evasions of personal responsibility, which create the official cast of mind. We do not have to develop, like Parliamentarians conditioned by a lifetime, the ability to produce the ready phrase, the smart reply and the flashing smile. And so it is not surprising these days that the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.

  Men like Young and Elliott saw themselves as Britain’s secret guardians, members of a chosen brotherhood unconstrained by normal conventions. Kim Philby had been a role model for many of the Robber Barons; his wordly savoir-faire and wartime successes affirmed their sense of collective identity. They now set out to rescue him.

  On 20 July 1955, ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair wrote to Dick White, his counterpart in MI5, claiming that Buster Milmo’s interrogation of Kim Philby had been ‘biased’, and that the former MI6 officer had been the ‘victim of a miscarriage of justice’. In a later memo to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, ‘C’ summed up the case for Philby’s defence:

  The Milmo Report, which produces no single piece of direct evidence to show that Philby was a Soviet agent or that he was the ‘Third Man’, is therefore a case for the prosecution inadmissible at law and unsuccessful in security intelligence. It is constructed of suppositious and circumstantial evidence, summing up in a circular argument everything the ingenuity of a prosecutor could devise against a suspect. It seems likely to remain as a permanently accusing finger pointed at Philby [who] was in fact convicted of nothing by the investigation in 1951 and despite four years of subsequent investigation is still convicted of nothing. It is entirely contrary to the English tradition for a man to have to prove his innocence … in a case where the prosecution has nothing but suspicion to go upon.

  The case should be re-examined, he said, and Philby given an opportunity to defend himself. ‘Produce the evidence, and there’ll be no further dispute,’ Sinclair told White. White reluctantly agreed that Philby should be interviewed once more, knowing that the case against him was not much stronger than it had been in 1951. The stage was now set for a final showdown, and Elliott, Philby’s ‘greatest defender’, would be waiting in the wings to stage-manage the drama.

  On 18 September, the People newspaper broke the story of Vladimir Petrov’s defection, with a series of dramatic revelations: Burgess and Maclean had both been recruited as Soviet agents while students at Cambridge; their flight to Moscow, just as Maclean was about to be arrested, had been orchestrated by the Soviet intelligence service; these were not ‘missing diplomats’, as the government had maintained for so long, but spies on the run. British secrecy laws had been used to hide the truth and shield the government from embarrassment.

  Harold Macmillan, the new Foreign Secretary, faced a major crisis: ‘We are going to have to say something,’ he said gloomily. Five days later, the government issued an eight-page White Paper purporting to explain the Burgess and Maclean affair. It was a peculiar mixture of half-truth and evasion that played down the scandal and made no mention of Kim Philby, whose name was now being widely whispered, and in some cases, shouted. At a dinner party, Aileen Philby rose unsteadily to her feet and upbraided her husband: ‘I know you are the Third Man.’ Even Philby’s wife was denouncing him in public; the press would not be far behind. The White Paper was dismissed as a cover-up.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, J. Edgar Hoover was as convinced of Philby’s guilt as James Angleton was sure of his innocence, and enraged at Britain’s failure to arrest him. The FBI chief decided to bring matters to a head, with a characteristic act of subterfuge. But first, Philby prepared for one last interrogation.

  On 7 October, two weeks after the publication of the White Paper, Philby presented himself at an MI6 safe house near Sloane Square, where he was ushered into a room furnished with a patterned sofa and chairs arranged around a small table; on one wall stood an ancient sideboard with a telephone on top. Inside the telephone was a high-quality microphone. An amplifier, placed under the floorboards beneath Philby’s chair, fed sound to the microphone, which was then relayed to Leconfield House, MI5 headquarters. Here the conversation would be recorded on acetate gramophone records, and then handed to typists who would transcribe every word.

  Philby was nervous. This would be his fourth formal interrogation. Despite Modin’s reassurances, he feared Petrov might have armed the investigators with some damning new clue. Philby had told MI6 he ‘welcomed the chance to clear his name’, but in truth he was tired, and worried. He braced himself for another flaying.

  Instead, what he experienced was closer to a fireside chat than an inquisition, an interview utterly different from any that had come before. A committee of inquiry, set up by Macmillan, had formally ruled that this round of questioning should be the responsibility of MI6, not MI5. This would not be an inquisition, in the manner of Buster Milmo, but an internal review of the situation carried out by two of Philby’s former colleagues ‘who knew him well’. It seems probable that one of them was Nick Elliott.

  As the conversation started, and the recording machines began to spin, MI5 officers listened with mounting fury as Philby was given the lightest possible grilling by his friends. ‘To call it an interrogation would be a travesty,’ one MI5 officer later wrote.

  It was an in-house MI6 interview . . . they took him gently over familiar ground. First his communist past, then his MI6 career and his friendship with Guy Burgess. Philby stuttered and stammered and protested his innocence. But listening to the disembodied voices, the lies seemed so clear. Whenever Philby floundered, one or other of his questioners guided him to an acceptable answer. ‘Well, I suppose such and such could be an explanation.’ Philby would gratefully agree and the interview would move on.

  Philby was sent home with a friendly handshake and a not-guilty verdict: ‘You may be pleased to know that we have come to a unanimous decision about your innocence’. Philby was jubilant. ‘The trail had become stale and muddy,’ he wrote. ‘The fact that I had made no attempt to escape over a long period was beginning to tell heavily in my favour.’ When Dick White read the transcripts, he was ‘livid’; the MI5 transcribers formally put on record their ‘belief that one of the questioners was prejudiced in Philby’s favour, repeatedly helping him find answers to awkward questions and never pressing questions which he failed to answer’. The Robber Barons had launched a highly effective counter-attack. But Philby was not yet safe.

  Just over a week later, on Sunday 23 October 1955, the Philby family awoke to find their home surrounded by a pack of journalists in full hue and cry. That morning in New York, the Sunday News had run a story naming Philby as the ‘Third Man’, the ‘tipster’ who had helped the defectors to flee. This was the work of Hoover, who had leaked Philby’s name to a tame journalist, to force the British into launching a full judicial investigation. For more than four years Philby’s name had been kept out of the newspapers, despite being common knowledge on Fleet Street. Now the hunt was on. ‘The house at Crowborough was besieged,’ reported Elliott, who advised Philby to hold off the press as long as possible. If British newspapers repeated what the Sunday News had reported, they could be sued for libel. But Philby’s name was now in print, and everyone was talking about the Third Man. It took two days more before the dam burst.

  See Notes on Chapter 12

  13

  The Third Man

  Colonel Marcus Lipton MP, the Labour member for Brixton, was a stuffy, old-fashioned trouble-maker, who distrusted government and loathed modern music, which he believed would bring down the monarchy. ‘If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it must be destroyed first,’ he once declared. He specialised in asking awkward questions. No one ever accused Lipton of being subtle, but he had a firm grip on political procedure, and in particular ‘parliamentary privile
ge’, the ancient right of MPs to make statements in Westminster without danger of prosecution.

  On Tuesday 25 October, he rose to his feet during Prime Minister’s Questions, and dropped a bombshell:

  Has the Prime Minister made up his mind to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby who was first secretary at the Washington embassy a little time ago, and is he determined to stifle all discussions on the very great matters which were evaded in the White Paper, which is an insult to the intelligence of the country?

  This was raw meat for the press: a feeding frenzy erupted.

  That afternoon, on a London Underground train heading home, Kim Philby’s eyes idly wandered to the newspaper headline on the front page of the first edition of his neighbour’s copy of the Evening Standard: ‘MP talks of “Dubious Third Man Activities of Mr Harold Philby”.’ The newspaper reported Lipton’s words verbatim. After more than two decades in hiding, Philby had been flushed into the open.

  Back in Crowborough, Philby immediately called Nicholas Elliott.

  ‘My name is in the newspapers. I have to do something.’

  Elliott was calm. ‘I agree with you. Certainly. But let’s think about it for a day, at least. Don’t do anything for a day, all right? I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  Making a statement at this stage would only add fuel to an already raging fire, and ‘might prejudice the case’. If Marcus Lipton had new evidence implicating Philby, he would surely have passed it on to the authorities and MI5 would have acted on it. The MP was simply repeating what had already appeared in the American press, under cover of parliamentary privilege. Harold Macmillan, as the minister in charge of the Foreign Office and MI6, would have to make a statement, either supporting Philby, or damning him: since MI5 plainly lacked the evidence to prosecute, there was a good chance Philby might be exonerated. Elliott’s advice was to stand firm, say nothing, ride out the storm, and allow his friends in MI6 to go to work on his behalf.