A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  ‘We’ve decided that you naturally must respond,’ Elliott told him the next day. ‘But it should be done only when the parliamentary debates begin. Please bear up for two weeks.’

  The Crowborough house presented a bizarre spectacle, with dozens of journalists camped out on the lawn. They followed Philby to the pub at lunchtime, and then trailed him back again, asking questions which he declined, most politely, to answer. The telephone rang incessantly. The Sunday Express posted a letter through the front door, offering £100 if Philby would take part in a public debate with Marcus Lipton. Elliott worried about the ‘additional stress for Aileen and the children’, and helped to spirit them away to stay with a relative. Philby himself took refuge with his mother in her South Kensington flat, where he disconnected the doorbell and stuffed the telephone under a pile of cushions. The press tore off the door knocker in their efforts to gain access. A journalist tried to climb in through the fire escape, terrifying the cook.

  The government had promised to make a statement and hold a debate on 7 November. Elliott now set to work ensuring that when Macmillan came to speak, he would say the right thing. The man selected to brief the Foreign Secretary on this tricky issue was none other than Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s friend from Eton and Trinity, who had helped to recruit Philby into MI6 during the war. Brooman-White had left the secret service for a career in politics, and in 1951 was elected Conservative MP for Rutherglen. Philby, Elliott and Brooman-White had been friends since 1939. When Parliament was sitting, Brooman-White lived in the top floor of Elliott’s house in Wilton Street; Elizabeth Elliott worked as his secretary; Claudia Elliott was his goddaughter; Elliott and Brooman-White even shared ownership of a racehorse. Brooman-White was the parliamentary voice of the Robber Barons, and Philby’s most vigorous defender in the House of Commons. In Philby’s words, Elliott, Brooman-White and his other allies remained ‘absolutely convinced I had been accused unfairly [and] simply could not imagine their friend could be a communist. They sincerely believed me and supported me.’

  The brief Brooman-White drew up for Macmillan purported to be unbiased, but ‘leaned heavily in favour of Philby’s innocence’. There was no hard evidence, Brooman-White insisted; his former colleague had lost his job simply because of a youthful dalliance with communism and an ill-advised friendship with Guy Burgess. These views chimed with Macmillan’s own instincts. An aristocratic Old Etonian, Macmillan regarded intelligence work as faintly dirty, and the row over Philby as an unnecessary spat between MI5 and MI6. He dearly wished to avoid a scandal, let alone a trial. ‘Nothing would be worse than a lot of muckraking and innuendo,’ Macmillan told the Cabinet, just five days before Lipton launched his attack. The Foreign Secretary simply wanted this embarrassing, unseemly mess to go away.

  On 7 November, Macmillan rose in the House of Commons, and made a statement that might have been written by Nicholas Elliott and Richard Brooman-White, and probably was.

  Mr Philby had Communist associates during and after his university days [but] no evidence has been found to show that he was responsible for warning Burgess or Maclean. While in Government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously. I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called ‘third man’ if, indeed, there was one.

  Richard Brooman-White followed up with a rousing defence of Philby – ‘a man whose name has been smeared’ – and a ferocious attack on Marcus Lipton as a McCarthyite witch-hunter, too cowardly to repeat his allegations outside the House of Commons and face the legal consequences.

  He [Lipton] is in favour of acting on suspicion, of smearing on suspicion, by directing public suspicion on to an individual against whom nothing at all has been proved. We must leave it to his own conscience to straighten out what that may cost in personal suffering to the wife, children and friends of the person involved. The only thing that has been proved against Mr Philby is that he had Burgess staying with him and he had certain Communist friends. He may not have been very wise in his choice of friends, but what honourable member of this House could say that all his friends were people against whom no shadow of suspicion could ever be cast?

  From the Labour benches came grumbling claims of another whitewash. ‘Whoever is covering up whom and on what pretext, whether because of the membership of a circle or a club, or because of good fellowship or whatever it may be, they must think again and think quickly,’ declared Frank Tomney MP, a tough northerner.

  Lipton tried to fight back. ‘I will not be gagged by anybody in this House or outside in the performance of my duty,’ he blustered. ‘Say it outside!’ chorused the Tories. Lipton limply responded: ‘Even Mr Philby has not asked for it to be repeated outside.’ He then sat down, visibly sagging.

  Philby now went in for the kill. Elliott had tipped him off that he would be cleared by Macmillan, but mere exoneration was not enough: he needed Lipton to retract his allegations, publicly, humiliatingly and quickly. After a telephone consultation with Elliott, he instructed his mother to inform all callers that he would be holding a press conference in Dora’s Drayton Gardens flat the next morning.

  *

  When Philby opened the door a few minutes before 11 a.m. on 8 November, he was greeted with gratifying proof of his new celebrity. The stairwell was packed with journalists from the world’s press. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘Do come in.’ Philby had prepared carefully. Freshly shaved and neatly barbered, he wore a well-cut pinstriped suit, a sober and authoritative tie, and his most charming smile. The journalists trooped into his mother’s sitting room, where they packed themselves around the walls. Camera flashes popped. In a conspicuous (and calculated) act of old world gallantry, Philby asked a journalist sitting in an armchair if he would mind giving up his seat to a lady journalist forced to stand in the doorway. The man leapt to his feet. The television cameras rolled.

  What followed was a dramatic tour de force, a display of cool public dishonesty that few politicians or lawyers could match. There was no trace of a stammer, no hint of nerves or embarrassment. Philby looked the world in the eye with a steady gaze, and lied his head off. Footage of Philby’s famous press conference is still used as a training tool by MI6, a master class in mendacity.

  Philby first read a prepared statement, explaining that he had not spoken out before because, having signed the Official Secrets Act, he could not legally disclose information derived from his position as a government official. ‘The efficiency of our security services can only be reduced by publicity given to their organisation, personnel and techniques,’ he intoned, sounding exactly like a Whitehall mandarin upholding the ancient rules of British secrecy. Edwin Newman, an American journalist with NBC, was delegated to ask the questions:

  If there was a third man, were you in fact the third man?

  No, I was not.

  Do you think there was one?

  No comment.

  Mr Philby, you yourself were asked to resign from the Foreign Office a few months after Burgess and Maclean disappeared. The Foreign Secretary said in the past you had communist associations. That is why you were asked to resign?

  I was asked to resign because of an imprudent association.

  That is your association with Burgess?

  Correct.

  What about the alleged communist associations? Can you say anything about them?

  The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was some time in 1934.

  That implies that you have spoken to communists unknowingly and not known about it.

  Well, I spoke to Burgess last in April or May, 1951.

  He gave you no idea that he was a communist at all?

  Never.

  Would you still regard Burgess, who lived with you for a while in Washington, as a friend of yours? How do you feel about him now?

  I consider his action deplorable . . .

  And here Philby paused, for just a beat: a man,
it seemed, wrestling with his own conflicted feelings, his duty, conscience and personal loyalty, and the pain of betrayal by a dear friend.

  . . . on the subject of friendship, I’d prefer to say as little as possible, because it’s very complicated.

  As for Lipton, Philby invited his accuser to repeat his allegations outside the House of Commons, or else hand over whatever information he had to the proper authorities.

  The press conference came to an end. Philby, ever the generous host, served the assembled journalists beer and sherry in his mother’s dining room. ‘I see you understand the habits of the press very well,’ joked an American reporter. The resulting press coverage contained no suggestion that Philby was anything other than an honest, upright government official, brought down by his friendship with a secret communist, and now definitively absolved. The Soviet intelligence officer Yuri Modin watched the press conference on the evening news, and marvelled at Philby’s ‘breathtaking’ performance: ‘Kim played his cards with consummate cunning. We concluded, just as he had, that the British government had no serious evidence against him.’

  Marcus Lipton had no choice but to retreat in ignominy, formally withdrawing his accusations, which he ‘deeply regretted’.

  ‘My evidence was insubstantial,’ the MP admitted. ‘When it came to a showdown my legal advisers counselled me to retract.’ Philby issued a clipped and gracious statement: ‘Colonel Lipton has done the right thing. So far as I am concerned, the incident is now closed.’

  Philby’s triumph was complete. Elliott was ‘overjoyed’ at Philby’s victory and the prospect of bringing him back into the firm. The Robber Barons would now actively ‘seek his reemployment by his old service’, which in turn raised the prospect, for Philby, of ‘further service to the Soviet cause’.

  Elliott had rehabilitated his old friend, just as his own career was about to take a most almighty dive.

  *

  In the dawn light of 19 April 1956, a peculiar figure in a rubber diving suit and flippers waddled sideways down the King’s Stairs at Portsmouth Harbour, and clambered into a waiting dinghy. The man was no more than five feet five inches tall. On his head he wore a woolly balaclava with a diving cap on top, and on his back a tank with enough oxygen for a ninety-minute dive. He was a decorated war hero, Britain’s most famous frogman, and his name was Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb.

  In the distance, through the drifting mist, loomed the faint shapes of three Soviet warships, newly arrived in Britain on a goodwill mission and berthed alongside the Southern Railway Jetty. An oarsman rowed the boat out some eighty yards offshore. Crabb adjusted his air tank, picked up a new experimental camera issued by the Admiralty Research Department, and extinguished the last of the cigarettes he had smoked continuously since waking. His task was to swim underneath the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, explore and photograph her keel, propellers and rudder, and then return. It would be a long, cold swim, alone, in extremely cold and dirty water, with almost zero visibility at a depth of about thirty feet. The job might have daunted a much younger and healthier man. For a forty-seven-year-old, unfit, chain-smoking depressive, who had been extremely drunk a few hours earlier, it was close to suicidal.

  The mission, codenamed ‘Operation Claret’, bore all the hallmarks of a Nicholas Elliott escapade: it was daring, imaginative, unconventional and completely unauthorised.

  Seven months earlier, Nikita Khrushchev had announced that he would visit Britain for the first time, accompanied by his premier, Nikolai Bulganin. The First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would travel aboard the latest Russian cruiser, the Ordzhonikidze, escorted by two destroyers. The Soviet leader would then be taken by special train to London, and dine at Number Ten with the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. The visit was hailed by diplomats as an important thaw in the Cold War. The spies saw other opportunities.

  The Soviets were rumoured to have developed a new type of propeller, as well as enhanced underwater sonar technology to evade submarines. With the arms race running at full tilt, MI6 and Naval Intelligence wanted to find out more. There was also an element of tit for tat. British warships had recently docked in Leningrad, and ‘frogmen had popped up all over the place’, in Elliott’s words. Anything the Soviets could do, MI6 could do better, and more secretly.

  The intelligence services sprang into action. MI5 set about bugging the Soviet leader’s suite at Claridge’s Hotel, and installed a listening device in the telephone. The Naval Intelligence Department urged that the investigation of the undersides of the Soviet vessels be undertaken as ‘a matter of high intelligence priority’. Elliott, the London station chief for MI6, was charged with exploiting this golden opportunity for espionage. As he put it, with typical ribaldry: ‘We wanted a closer look at those Russian ladies’ bottoms.’ He knew just the man for the job.

  Lionel Crabb earned his nickname from the American actor, athlete and pin-up Buster Crabbe, who had played Flash Gordon in the film series and won a gold medal for swimming at the 1932 Olympics. In almost every way, the English Buster Crabb was entirely unlike his namesake, being English, tiny, and a poor swimmer (without flippers, he could barely complete three lengths of a swimming pool). With his long nose, bright eyes and miniature frame, he might have been an aquatic garden gnome. He was, however, spectacularly brave, and supremely resilient. Born to a poor family in South London, he first served in the Merchant Navy and then joined the Royal Navy after the outbreak of war, training as a diver. In 1942 he was dispatched to Gibraltar, to take part in the escalating underwater battle around the Rock, where Italian frogmen, using manned torpedoes and limpet mines, were sinking thousands of tons of Allied shipping. Crabb and his fellow divers set out to stop them, with remarkable success, blowing up enemy divers with depth charges, intercepting torpedoes and peeling mines off the hulls of ships. When war ended, Crabb cleared mines from the ports of Venice and Livorno, and when the militant Zionist group Irgun began attacking British ships with underwater explosives, he was called in to defuse them. The risks were staggering, but Crabb survived and was duly awarded the George Medal for ‘undaunted devotion to duty’. He became, briefly, a celebrity. Small boys mobbed him, and he frequently appeared in the newspapers. Long after demobilisation, Crabb continued to do odd, secret or particularly dangerous underwater jobs for the Navy.

  Elliott had got to know Crabb during the war, and considered him ‘a most engaging man of the highest integrity . . . as well as being the best frogman in the country, probably in the world’. He cut a remarkable figure in civilian life, wearing beige tweeds, a monocle and a pork pie hat, and carrying a Spanish swordstick with a silver knob carved into the shape of a crab. But there was another, darker side to this ‘kindly bantam cock’. Crabb suffered from deep depressions, and had a weakness for gambling, alcohol and barmaids. When taking a woman out to dinner he liked to dress up in his frogman outfit; unsurprisingly, this seldom had the desired effect, and his emotional life was a mess. In 1956 he was in the process of getting divorced after a marriage that had lasted only a few months. He worked, variously, as a model, undertaker and art salesman, but like many men who had seen vivid wartime action, he found peace a pallid disappointment. He was also feeling his age. When Elliott contacted him, Buster Crabb was working at Espresso Furnishings in Seymour Place, selling tables to cafés. Crabb accepted the mission without hesitation. He wanted, he said, ‘to get m’ feet wet again, get m’ gills back’. Money was not discussed. Instead, Elliott joked that if the investigation of the Ordzhonikidze proved successful, Crabb could be assured of ‘supplies of whisky for many years’. Others were doubtful that Crabb was up to the task. John Henry, the MI6 technical officer, pointed out that the diver seemed to be ‘heading for a heart attack’. But Elliott insisted that ‘Crabb was still the most experienced frogman in England, and totally trustworthy . . . He begged to do the job for patriotic as well as personal motives.’ Ted Davies, a former sailor who headed MI6’s naval liaison unit, was assigned as his case offi
cer.

  Operation Claret proceeded with the sort of smoothness that suggested no one in authority was paying adequate attention. Michael Williams, a Foreign Office official recently posted to oversee MI6, was handed a list of possible operations for the Soviet visit. ‘The dicey operations [are] at the beginning of the file and the safer ones at the back,’ he was told. Williams was distracted by the death of his father that morning. A short while later he handed the file back without comment. MI6 assumed this amounted to Foreign Office approval; Williams assumed someone senior to him must already have given the go-ahead; the Admiralty assumed that MI6 was responsible, since it was carrying out the mission; and MI6 assumed the Admiralty was in the driving seat, since it had asked for the information in the first place. And the Prime Minister assumed that no spies were doing anything, because that was exactly what he had ordered them to do.

  Back in September, when the Khrushchev trip was first mooted, Anthony Eden stated categorically: ‘These ships are our guests and, however we think others would behave, we should take no action which involves the slightest risk of detection.’ Eden shared Macmillan’s distaste for spying, and was not about to have the adventurers of MI6 spoiling this moment of delicate international diplomacy. When Elliott was later quizzed about who had signed off on the operation, and in what capacity, his shrugging reply was most revealing. ‘We don’t have a chain of command. We work like a club.’

  A week before the Soviet delegation arrived, Anthony Eden learned that plans were being hatched for underwater surveillance of the Ordzhonikidze, and put his foot down even more firmly. ‘I am sorry, but we cannot do anything of this kind on this occasion,’ he wrote. Elliott would later insist that the ‘operation was mounted after receiving a written assurance of the Navy’s interest and in the firm belief that government clearance had been given’. He either did not know about the Prime Minister’s veto or, more likely, didn’t care.