Once again, Elliott and Philby’s lives seemed to move in parallel: while Philby headed to the Middle East, Elliott took up a new job as MI6 station chief in Vienna. Usually so ebullient, Elliott could summon little enthusiasm for his new posting. Vienna, he wrote, ‘had an ersatz gaiety and smelled of corruption’. The city seemed dowdy and drab, with few opportunities for high-grade espionage. His former school friend Peter Lunn preceded him in the post, and bequeathed him a comfortable apartment overlooking the Belvedere Palace gardens, with room for his growing family. Lunn also left him a bad-tempered Slovene cook called Irene and a red Wolseley (a conspicuous vehicle for a spy since it was the only one of its kind in the city). He went skiing at weekends, enjoyed poking fun at his stodgy Viennese counterparts and set about establishing a network of spies. But he was bored in Austria. ‘The climate of Vienna is not conducive to energy,’ he wrote.
The Beirut job finally put paid to the Philbys’ marriage. ‘Haunted by Kim’s life of treason’ and agonised by the stress of his public acquittal, the discovery that her husband was leaving the country sent Aileen into terminal alcoholic decline. There was never any question that she and the children would accompany him to Beirut; she did not try to stop him, and if she had, it would have made no difference. Her psychiatrist became so alarmed by her disintegration that he had her briefly committed to a mental hospital. With the children at boarding school, Aileen shut herself up in the gloomy house in Crowborough which, according to Flora Solomon, ‘she maintained in the hope of a reconciliation with her errant Kim’. Philby told Aileen he would refund her household bills, and left.
*
Beirut was exotic, tense and dangerous, a salmagundi of races, religions and politics, rendered even more febrile by the rising tide of Arab nationalism and Cold War conflict. It was fertile ground for journalism in 1956, and an even better place for espionage. ‘Lebanon was the only Arab country without censorship and with good communications,’ wrote the newspaper correspondent Richard Beeston, who arrived in the city shortly before Philby. ‘So inevitably Beirut became the listening post for the region, with the St Georges [Hotel] and its bar its epicentre – a bazaar for the trading of information between diplomats, politicians, journalists and spies.’ Philby landed at Beirut airport in August, and made straight for the bar of the St Georges.
The Beirut beat was a demanding one. Middle Eastern politics were as complex and volatile in 1956 as they are today. But as Philby knew from his years as a correspondent in Civil War Spain, there is no better cover job for a spy than that of journalist, a profession that enables the asking of direct, unsubtle and impertinent questions about the most sensitive subjects, without arousing suspicion. A topic of interest to readers of the Observer could, when explored at greater depth, be passed on to British intelligence. Philby began cultivating people – politicians, military officers, diplomats and other journalists – who might prove useful as sources for journalism, or espionage, or both. The line between Philby’s two occupations was blurred from the outset. At first he lived in a house rented by his father outside Beirut, where the elder Philby had been exiled after criticising Ibn Saud’s successor. When St John Philby returned to Saudi Arabia, Philby took a flat in the Muslim quarter of the city. Richard Beeston met Philby soon after his arrival in the Lebanese capital: ‘He was quintessentially English, relaxed and courteous, amusing – and this, combined with a rather painful stammer, made him pretty well irresistible to women. He could charm the birds out of the trees.’ But beneath the bonhomie, Beeston sensed Philby’s inner solitude. ‘He seemed a rather lonely, rumpled figure.’ He was not alone for long.
Eleanor Brewer was a forty-two-year-old sometime architect, amateur sculptor and former Red Cross worker from Seattle, married to Sam Pope Brewer, the New York Times correspondent in Beirut. She was tall and slim, sweet-natured, and restless. She had met her husband in wartime Istanbul, where he was reporting for the New York Times and she was working in the overseas branch of the Office of War Information. Nicholas Elliott had known them both in those years, as another glamorous couple in the Istanbul throng. By 1956 Eleanor was unhappily married and bored. Beeston recalled her as a ‘rangy, steady-drinking American, who looked tough and sophisticated. Underneath she was a romantic, and politically naïve.’ Like most people who proclaim themselves free spirits, she was fiercely conventional.
Sam Brewer had first encountered Philby while covering the Spanish Civil War, so when the American newspaperman learned that his former colleague had arrived in Beirut, he was eager to extend a welcome. In early September, Brewer left Beirut on an extended reporting trip, and told his wife to keep an eye out for Philby: ‘If I should meet Kim I was to introduce him to our friends, and do what I could to help him,’ she later recalled. Eleanor’s welcome to Philby would prove rather warmer than her husband had intended.
On 12 September 1956, Eleanor Brewer was drinking with some friends at the St Georges, when someone pointed out Kim Philby, sitting at the bar. She sent a message via the waiter, inviting him to join their party.
What touched me first about Kim Philby was his loneliness. A certain old-fashioned reserve set him apart from the easy familiarity of the other journalists. He was then forty-four, of medium height, very lean with a handsome heavily lined face. His eyes were an intense blue . . . He had a gift of such intimacy that I found myself talking freely to him. I was very impressed by his beautiful manners. We took him under our wing. He soon became one of our closest friends.
Philby spent Christmas with the Brewers. Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife. The secret lovers met at a little café they called the Shaky Floor, although the shakiness of the floor may have been due to the amount they drank there. They shared picnics in the hills, smoked hubble-bubble pipes in the Arab coffee houses, and exchanged love notes written in gushing teenage prose. ‘Kim was a delightful companion,’ Eleanor wrote. ‘I had never met a kinder, more interesting person in my entire life.’ Eleanor was besotted, and blamed her husband for their deteriorating marriage. Sam was only interested in politics, she complained, and criticised her cooking: ‘My soufflés were never quite right.’ As in his other life, Philby revelled in the subterfuge, the secret messages and surreptitious meetings, the thrill of deception. While conducting his clandestine love affair, Philby discreetly checked for any signs of surveillance. No one was following him.
Philby’s journalism from Beirut was solid, if unspectacular. When asked to write on a subject he considered too fluffy – such as Arabian slave girls – he used the pseudonym ‘Charles Garner’. Even in journalism, he embraced a double existence. He also began to collect information for his MI6 handlers. He possessed a ‘sound knowledge of their requirements’. Much of his early intelligence work in Lebanon involved chatting informally to senior Arab politicians, and then ‘telling the British government what they really thought’. MI6 was evidently satisfied: a year after Philby’s arrival in Beirut, the visiting head of MI6’s Middle East desk took him to lunch at an expensive restaurant overlooking the sea, and told him his status was being confirmed and his retainer increased. ‘Anxious to be in their good books,’ Philby resolved to work ‘as conscientiously as possible’ for MI6, while awaiting the inevitable call from the KGB.
Philby’s Beirut habits were regular. At midday he would repair to the Normandie Hotel, less conspicuous and cheaper than the St Georges, to down his first drink of the day, vodka with V8, open his post, and read the newspapers. One afternoon, a chunky young man in his thirties, evidently a foreigner, approached Philby at his corner table, and presented him with his card: ‘Petukhov, Soviet Trade Mission’.
‘I read your articles in the Observer and in The Economist, Mr Philby,’ he said. ‘I find them very deep. I sought you out to ask you for the favour of your time for a conversation. I am particularly interested in the prospects for a Common Market of the Arab countries.’
Philby could have put an e
nd to his double life at that moment. He could have explained to Petukhov that he had no interest in discussing Arab economics with him, and so conveyed a message to the KGB that he was no longer in the game. Other agents recruited in the 1930s, including Anthony Blunt, had successfully disengaged from Soviet intelligence. He had a new life, a new lover, and two interesting, compatible and remunerative jobs: with the protection of Nicholas Elliott, he was safe from further investigation by MI5; his reputation as a journalist and Middle East expert was growing. He could have rejected the approach from the KGB with impunity. Instead, he invited Petukhov to tea at his flat.
Philby would later frame his decision as one of ideological purity, consistent with the ‘total commitment to the Soviet Union’ he had made at the age of twenty-one. He did what he did, in his own estimation, out of pure political conviction, the guiding principle of his life. He looked with disdain on others who had seen the horrors of Stalinism and abandoned ship. ‘I stayed the course,’ he wrote, ‘in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberration of individuals.’ Philby later claimed that he had experienced moments of doubt, and that his views had been ‘influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime’. But there is no evidence that he ever questioned the ideology he had discovered at Cambridge, changed his opinions, or seriously acknowledged the iniquities of practical communism. Philby never shared or discussed his views, either with friend or foe. Instead, he retained and sustained his faith without the need for priests or fellow believers, in perfect isolation. Philby regarded himself as an ideologue and a loyalist; in truth, he was a dogmatist, valuing only one opinion: his own.
But there was more than politics in Philby’s eager return to the embrace of the KGB. Philby enjoyed deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce. Some men like to parade their knowledge. Others revel in the possession of information that they decline to share, and the private sense of superiority that this brings. Philby was a faithless husband, but a kind lover, a good friend, a gentle father and a generous host. He had a talent for tenderness. But he also relished withholding the truth from those he was closest to; there was the Philby they knew, and then there was the Philby only he knew. The alcohol helped maintain the double life. For an alcoholic has already become divorced from his or her real self, hooked on an artificial reality. Philby did not want to give up spying, and he probably could not have stopped if he had wanted to: because he was addicted.
The day after their encounter at the Normandie, Petukhov arrived promptly at Philby’s flat at three in the afternoon – it was a dangerous place for a rendezvous, and one that would not be repeated. The ground rules were established. If Philby wanted a meeting, he would stand on his balcony holding a newspaper at a given hour; if he needed to see Petukhov urgently, he would be holding a book. Henceforth, Philby and his new case officer would meet at regular intervals, always after sunset, always in Beirut, always in some discreet corner of the city. The KGB residence in Beirut was ‘a hive of activity’, according to Yuri Modin, with agents deployed throughout the Middle East. Philby was told that his first priority was to ascertain ‘the intentions of the United States and British governments in the area’. He happily set to work.
In the autumn of 1956, Eleanor Brewer told her husband that she was leaving him. Sam Brewer, who had finally cottoned on to his wife’s torrid affair, raised no objection, and Eleanor returned to Seattle with her daughter, telling Philby she would get a ‘Mexican Divorce’, which was quicker and cheaper than the American variety since the spouse did not need to be present. The only remaining obstacle was Aileen Philby.
*
Since Philby’s departure, Aileen had hurtled downhill. She was virtually penniless, deeply unhappy and usually drunk. Philby complained of Aileen’s ‘idleness’, and claimed she spent most of her time at point-to-point races. He refused to send her more cash until she explained what she was spending it on. ‘No receipts, no money,’ he said. She spent longer and longer periods in psychiatric hospitals. Her old friend Flora Solomon dispatched Stuart Lisbona, of the Marks and Spencer Pensions Department, to keep a ‘helpful eye’ on ‘poor Aileen . . . abandoned by her husband’.
On 12 December 1957, Aileen Philby was discovered dead in the bedroom of the house in Crowborough. Her friends believed she had killed herself, with drink and pills. Her psychiatrist suspected, fantastically, that she ‘might have been murdered’ by Philby, because she knew too much. The coroner ruled she had died from heart failure, myocardial degeneration, tuberculosis, and a respiratory infection having contracted influenza. Her alcoholism undoubtedly accelerated her death. She was forty-seven.
Elliott was deeply upset when news of Aileen’s tragic end reached him in Vienna. She had shown ‘considerable strength of character’ throughout her suffering, and he would always remember her as she had once been, ‘a charming woman, and a loving wife and mother’. But he could not bring himself to blame Philby for her death, which he ascribed to Aileen’s ‘grave mental problem’. Not so Flora Solomon, who held Philby directly and personally responsible. ‘I endeavoured to strike him from my memory,’ she wrote. ‘This, however, was not to be.’
Richard Beeston and his wife Moyra were Christmas shopping in Beirut’s Bab Idriss, when they were spotted by Kim Philby, who rushed across the road: ‘I have wonderful news darlings,’ he said excitedly. ‘I want you to come and celebrate.’ Philby dragged the Beestons off to the Normandie, plied them with drink, and then produced a telegram from England informing him of Aileen’s death. It was, he said, a ‘wonderful escape’, as he was now free to marry ‘a wonderful American girl’. The Beestons were ‘stunned’.
The Furse family took over all the arrangements for her funeral back in England, which Philby did not attend. The five Philby children never knew where their mother was buried.
It took another seven months for Eleanor to obtain her divorce. When it was finalised, she at once sent a telegram to Philby, who cabled back: ‘Clever wonderful you fly back happily song in heart life is miraculous greatest love Kim.’ The same morning, Philby rushed to the St Georges to find Sam Brewer. Their conversation, as described by Eleanor herself, is one of the classic exchanges between a cuckold and an adulterer:
Philby: ‘I’ve come to tell you that I’ve had a cable from Eleanor. She has got her divorce and I want you to be the first person to know that I’m going to marry her.’
Brewer: ‘That sounds like the best possible solution. What do you make of the situation in Iraq?’
Kim Philby and Eleanor Brewer were married in Holborn registry office in London on 24 January 1959, just over a year after Aileen’s death. Nicholas and Elizabeth Elliott returned from Vienna to attend the ceremony, along with other MI6 colleagues, past and present. Elliott had not forgotten Aileen, but he swiftly took Philby’s new wife to his heart: ‘Eleanor was in many ways not dissimilar to Aileen,’ he wrote. ‘She had integrity, courage and humour. Like Aileen, she could not be described as intellectual but she was certainly intelligent.’ The couple spent their honeymoon in Rome, where Philby wrote: ‘We shall take a house in the mountains: she will paint; I will write; peace and stability at last.’ Eleanor was his third wife, and the second to know nothing of his true allegiance.
Back in Beirut, the newlyweds moved into a fifth-floor flat on the Rue Kantari, with a large balcony overlooking the mountains and sea which offered a ‘ringside view’ of the civil war now engulfing Lebanon. ‘He would sit in his terrace at night and listen to the guns going off,’ Eleanor recalled. The flat was spacious enough to accommodate all their children during the holidays from boarding school. Despite the grim circumstances of Aileen’s death and Philby’s swift remarriage, his children adored him, and he remained an attentive and caring father.
And so began a period of domestic harmony, unchallenging journalism, and discreet international espionage. There were parties and picnics, and much alcohol. Eleanor des
cribed a ‘leisurely daily circuit of shopping and gossip’, starting at the Normandie (‘Kim treated the place like a club’) before moving on to the St Georges ‘to see what the other journalists were up to’. Philby hinted to his new wife that he was ‘connected with British intelligence’, but naturally provided no details. He would disappear from time to time. It never occurred to Eleanor to ask where he had been. Compared to her first husband, Philby took a relaxed, even casual, approach to journalism: ‘He seemed to write his weekly articles fast and painlessly – often dictating them to me.’ Philby’s fellow hacks considered him lazy, yet ‘compelling a certain respect’, in part because he appeared to wear his responsibilities so lightly.
Philby devoted more energy (though not much more) to intelligence-gathering. A fellow journalist noticed that he was often to be seen in the company of ‘men whose ostensible jobs as businessmen, bankers, university professors, consultants for foreign companies, and so forth, did not wholly account for their insiders’ preoccupation with Arab politics’. Whatever information of value he gleaned was handed over to Paulson of MI6; then Philby passed the same information to Petukhov of the KGB, with whatever additional intelligence might be helpful to the Soviet cause.
A Spy Among Friends Page 24
