A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  On both sides of the Iron Curtain, opinion in intelligence circles was divided over Philby’s usefulness. Yuri Modin, still monitoring Agent Stanley, was enthusiastic. ‘The information he supplied on British policies in the region proved invaluable to our government in our relations with Arab countries . . . I myself read several of his reports, noting with satisfaction that he had not lost his brilliant touch.’ Philby’s information ‘attracted much attention at the top’. Yet some in Moscow complained that Philby was simply peddling recycled journalism. ‘There was criticism,’ Modin noted, ‘concerning his tendency to send us hard news wrapped up in beautifully written political evaluations. We did not need this because we had our own people to make evaluations . . . the KGB had its own experts here in Moscow and in the capitals, highly trained Arabists all.’ This is an old trick of espionage: when spies obtain knowledge but not secrets, they tend to dress up mere information to make it look like intelligence; and when they do not have solid information, they fabricate it. Similar grumbling could be heard in parts of Broadway, particularly among the Arabists of MI6. ‘You could have read it all in the Economist last week,’ said one London analyst, after looking through Philby’s latest submission. ‘He’s got a lot of it wrong as well. It’s invented. He’s taking us to the cleaners.’ Philby’s supporters, notably Elliott and Young, ignored the carping, and circulated Philby’s reports as the latest penetrating insights from Our Man in Beirut.

  In truth, Philby was going soft, and drinking hard: content to do a little journalism, a little espionage on the side for both sides, but nothing too strenuous. He was coasting, it seemed, towards quiet and comfortable irrelevance as a second-rate journalist, and a minor spy.

  Then Nicholas Elliott arrived in Beirut, as the new station chief of MI6, and the wheel of their friendship turned again.

  See Notes on Chapter 14

  15

  The Fox who Came to Stay

  Beirut was another plum posting. The Crabb affair had done Nicholas Elliott’s career no lasting damage, and he had performed well during his brief stint in Vienna. Indeed, within MI6 he was still considered a high-flier, the leader of the Robber Barons. It was said that, ‘but for his preference for operations, not administration, he might well have been appointed C’. Elliott was pleased to be moving on from Austria. ‘I have no wish to be churlish about our time in Vienna,’ he wrote (Elliott’s politeness even extended to cities), ‘nevertheless we were not unhappy’ to leave. With the Middle East heating up, Beirut was an important step up the intelligence ladder. The Elliotts travelled by boat from Genoa, and as they pulled into the port, Elliott marvelled at how little Beirut had changed since his last visit in 1942. Elizabeth had been his secretary then, and he had courted her over lunch at the Hotel Lucullus, whose restaurant was famed for its French-Lebanese cuisine. As soon as they landed, Elliott announced, with romantic fanfare, they would be lunching at the Lucullus again. No sooner were they seated, than a beaming Kim Philby appeared and wrapped Elliott in a welcoming hug. ‘It was a most agreeable reunion,’ recalled Elliott, who pretended that the meeting had been accidental. He was taking over as station chief from Paul Paulson, but Philby was the person he wanted to see on his first day in Beirut. They were joined by Eleanor, an ‘excellent bouillabaisse’ was served, more bottles were opened, glasses were raised and drained. Elliott happily turned to Philby: ‘Fill me in, old boy.’

  The Elliotts moved into a flat on the top floor of the Immeuble Tabet on the Rue Verdun, on the border between the Christian and Muslim quarters, not far from the Philbys. The apartment had ‘cool, high rooms, wide balconies and marble floors’ and was ‘perfect in every way’. That evening, as they listened to the muezzin’s call wafting over the city, Elliott ‘thought nostalgically of the gentle sound of the Mullahs calling the faithful to prayer from the minarets of Istanbul many years before’. He was as happy as he had ever been, and back in his element, in a foreign city seething with espionage possibilities, fighting communist aggression alongside his oldest friend, his most trusted colleague, and the man who would explain to him the mysteries of the Middle East. Once more they would be ‘two old friends in Crown service on the frontiers’.

  As Eleanor Philby observed, Elliott had hitherto been a ‘European specialist and knew little of Arab politics. He came green to the Middle East.’ He had much to learn, as he admitted: ‘Apart from all the political complexities and the plotting – almost any major financial or political intrigue in the Middle East at that time had its roots in Beirut – you had to get to grips with the Lebanese character. The labyrinths of Lebanese politics were of daunting complexity.’ Philby would be his guide, ‘his personal adviser’.

  The arrival of a new spy chief did not go unnoticed among Beirut’s journalists. One left this portrait of Elliott:

  He was a thin, spare man with a reputation as a shrewd operator whose quick humorous glance behind round glasses gave a clue to his sardonic mind. In manner and dress he suggested an Oxbridge don at one of the smarter colleges, but with a touch of worldly ruthlessness not always evident in academic life. Foreigners liked him, appreciating his bonhomie and his fund of risqué stories. He got on particularly well with Americans. The formal, ladylike figure of his wife in the background contributed to the feeling that British intelligence in Beirut was being directed by a gentleman.

  Elliott and Philby were once again inseparable, professionally and socially. The pace of Philby’s intelligence-gathering, hitherto leisurely, even lackadaisical, suddenly became frenetic, as Elliott ‘put Kim to work, setting him targets, sending him on trips, requesting reports which were then combed over in conversation’. During his first four years in Beirut, Philby had ventured outside Lebanon only as far as Syria, and once to visit his father in Saudi Arabia. Now, at Elliott’s behest, he scrambled all over the Middle East, ostensibly on newspaper assignments, to Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait and Yemen. The hitherto indolent journalist was a reporting whirlwind. But a careful observer might have spotted that his output fell far short of his industriousness; he was visiting many more places and people than he was writing about, at least publicly. In the first nine months of 1960, he filed just six stories for the Observer. One editor from the Economist paid him a visit, noted how seldom he seemed to write for the magazine, and casually asked him if he found it difficult ‘serving two masters’. Philby was momentarily speechless, until he realised she was referring to his newspaper employers, not his espionage.

  Philby delivered a torrent of information to Elliott, ‘mainly political and personality reporting’ and ‘reports about political developments in most Arab states’. The two men would huddle together, for long debriefing sessions. ‘They used to meet once or twice a week,’ wrote Eleanor. ‘Vanishing into another room and leaving me to gossip with Elizabeth.’ Elliott’s support and confidence was demonstrated in other, more practical ways. Towards the end of 1960, Philby returned home late one night, clutching a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, happily scattering them around the room. ‘This is going to make our Christmas!’ Eleanor had no doubt the money came from Elliott, an early Christmas present for his best friend and most industrious agent.

  Some have claimed that Elliott’s energetic deployment of Philby was merely a ruse, to see if ‘greater participation in the British intelligence effort’ would reveal contact with the Soviets. There is little evidence to support this theory. If Elliott had suspected Philby, he would have put a tail on him, and easily discovered his meetings with Petukhov. He did not. Dick White’s instructions were to ‘keep an eye on Philby’, but there was no suggestion that he should be investigated, probed or put under surveillance. White seems to have accepted, at least outwardly, that the Philby case was closed. Far from doubting him, Elliott trusted Philby completely, and his determination to employ him to the full reflected only ‘Elliott’s overt and innocent friendship’, and an admiration stretching back twenty years.

  Philby, in turn, was buoyed by his return
to active intelligence work, and seemed to relish the confidence reposed in him by his old friend. Eleanor noticed the change in her husband’s demeanour following Elliott’s arrival: ‘I had begun to feel that Kim was bored with journalism, and that writing articles for newspapers did not wholly satisfy him. His meetings with [Elliott] were more like real work.’ What Philby considered his real work, of course, consisted of passing to Soviet intelligence every scrap of information he could gather, both on his travels, and from Elliott. Their relationship was running along the old tracks in more ways than Elliott knew.

  Philby’s value as a Soviet agent increased in direct proportion to his activities as a British agent, and as Elliott’s informant he was privy to important information, including the identities of MI6 contacts in the region, as well as sympathetic Arab politicians and officials on the payroll. Elliott achieved a remarkable coup by being able to ‘broker a deal with the director of Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] for the exchange of intelligence on the Middle East’. Philby did not know everything that Elliott knew; but from the instructions issued by Elliott, he at least knew what MI6 wanted to know, and that, in the negative world of spying, is almost as valuable. Yuri Modin was pleased with Agent Stanley: ‘In all he served us well.’

  Elliott and Philby spied, plotted and socialised together, in a family friendship that intensified over time. Eleanor and Elizabeth became as close as their husbands. At weekends the two families shared a bathing cabin named ‘Acapulco’ on Khalde beach with Colonel Alec Brodie, a much-wounded, one-eyed, pipe-smoking war veteran who was military attaché at the embassy. During school holidays, the Elliott and Philby children mixed happily together. Elliott’s teenagers, Mark and Claudia, both liked Philby, an avuncular, amusing presence. ‘He was one of the few adults to take me seriously,’ Mark Elliott recalled.

  Despite the rising political tension, Beirut was still a happy playground for expatriates and tourists, a place where, in Elliott’s words, one could ‘ski in the mornings and swim in the afternoons’, and enjoy hillside picnics in between. The fun did not stop at nightfall, but extended long into the night, with an endless round of cocktails and dinners. As they had in Switzerland, the Elliotts played host to a stream of visitors. One of the earliest was Ian Fleming, who called unannounced from the airport in November 1960, and invited himself to stay. Fleming was en route to Kuwait, on a lucrative assignment from the Kuwait Oil Company to write about the country. By now a hugely successful writer, Fleming continued his freelance intelligence activities and explained to Elliott that Naval Intelligence was keen to learn more about the defences of the Iraqi port at Basra. Elliott ‘promised to look after it’. Elliott asked for a favour in return: a rare fall of rain in Kuwait had brought out a crop of delicious white truffles. Would Fleming send back a box? This was Elliott’s style of espionage: a little spying in return for truffles. That evening Fleming announced he was meeting ‘an Armenian’ in the Place des Canons; Elliott got the distinct impression that the creator of 007 had in fact ‘arranged to see a pornographic film in full colour and sound’.

  As the months passed, Elliott and Philby socialised together more and more, meeting regularly ‘at parties for British diplomats and journalists’. The Elliott family photographs from the summer of 1960 are filled with images of the intermingled Philby and Elliott clans, enjoying Beirut’s beachlife and nightlife: Philby is in most pictures, in bathing trunks, T-shirt or suit, smiling, tanned, and frequently, very obviously, drunk.

  Philby’s behaviour was becoming increasingly outrageous, in ways reminiscent of the antics of Guy Burgess. ‘Out of fun rather than malice,’ wrote Elliott, he ‘would make some remark well calculated to stop the conversation dead in its tracks. Such remarks served to lighten the atmosphere of a dreary party but were often the cause of severe umbrage.’ Elliott egged him on, and recalled one particularly spectacular episode of Philby devilry that ‘caused a chain reaction of offence unparalleled in my experience’. In social fallout, the Cocktail Party from Hell came close to the Dinner Party from Hell.

  It was at a cocktail party given in our flat by Elizabeth and myself when my parents, then pretty elderly, had come out to stay. We had invited some forty people, including the Philbys and our ambassador, Sir Moore Crosthwaite. There was an unusual pause in the babble of conversation during which Philby was heard to remark to Moore: ‘Don’t you think Anne [the wife of a member of the embassy staff who was standing next to him] has the finest breasts in Beirut?’ Moore was undoubtedly annoyed because he thought that the breasts of the wife of a member of his staff were not an appropriate subject of conversation at a cocktail party. Anne, while doubtless justifiably proud of that part of her anatomy, was annoyed at having it discussed in public and in particular with the ambassador. Her husband was annoyed as he agreed with the ambassador that his wife’s breasts were an off-target subject for cocktail party gossip. Jane, the wife of another member of the embassy staff, was annoyed because she thought she had better breasts than Anne. Jane’s husband was annoyed possibly because he thought his wife had been slighted. Eleanor Philby was more than just annoyed because she was not particularly well endowed in that respect and comparisons are odious. And, finally, Elizabeth was annoyed because she felt the whole party was getting out of hand. In fact the only person who thought the whole episode was a huge joke was Kim Philby himself.

  And Nicholas Elliott, who regaled listeners with it for the rest of his life.

  Privately, Elliott worried about Philby’s alcoholic intake. He had seen Aileen drink herself into the grave. Philby’s mother Dora was drinking a bottle of gin a day by the time of her death in 1957. Elliott feared the effect Philby’s boozing might be having on his health, and on his children: ‘He had no inhibitions about getting drunk in front of them.’ Philby even trained his young son Harry to mix a ‘fierce Martini’.

  Philby and Elliott both worked assiduously to cultivate Americans, particularly those involved in intelligence, of which Beirut, as a Cold War battleground, was plentifully supplied. Relations between the CIA and MI6 had come under intense strain after the Burgess and Maclean defections and the accusations against Philby, but by 1960, the relationship was back on an even keel. In some quarters of Washington, suspicion of Philby still lingered: at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover remained convinced of his guilt, as did Bill Harvey. But within the CIA, it was generally agreed that if MI6 considered him trustworthy, and Harold Macmillan had said he was innocent, then Philby must be clean. Angleton had risen to new heights in the CIA. In 1954 he was named chief of the counter-intelligence staff, a position he would retain for the next two decades. As America’s premier spy-catcher, he was becoming ‘recognised as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world’. More gaunt and aloof than ever, Angleton trusted few, and mistrusted most, inspiring a peculiar mixture of awe and fear among his colleagues. He later claimed to have rumbled Philby, but his actions clearly indicate otherwise. According to one historian, Philby was still in amicable contact with Angleton from time to time, ‘and used those opportunities to reassure his American friend of his innocence’. If the CIA had suspected Philby of being a Soviet spy, then Angleton’s operatives in Beirut would have been under instructions to avoid him, watch him and, if possible, catch him. Instead, Philby mixed freely among the throngs of American spies.

  One of the most flamboyant of these was Wilbur Crane Eveland, a boisterous intelligence veteran from the West Coast, who favoured full morning dress, and arrived in Beirut at around the same time as Philby as a special agent for Allen Dulles, the CIA chief. Working independently of the CIA station, Eveland’s role appears to have been that of anti-communist paymaster in the Middle East: he bankrolled CIA efforts to overthrow the Soviet-sponsored government in Syria, provided support to the Saud dynasty in Riyadh, and propped up Lebanon’s pro-Western president, Camille Chamoun. ‘He travelled regularly to the presidential palace with his briefcase stuffed with Lebanese pounds,’ according to Richard Beeston,
‘returning late at night to the American embassy to replenish the slush fund.’ Eveland had met Philby through the Brewers (Eveland and Eleanor were both from Spokane in Washington state), and they immediately struck up a friendship. He knew Philby had links with British intelligence, and saw him as someone ‘whose brain was there to be picked’, an attitude that was entirely reciprocated by Philby. Eleanor later told the CIA that Philby had once remarked that ‘all he had to do was to have one evening with Bill Eveland in Beirut and before it was over he would know of all his operations’.

  Philby established a similarly cosy relationship with Edgar J. Applewhite, the clever, sharp-suited, Yale-educated CIA station chief sent to Lebanon in 1958. Applewhite knew of the earlier suspicions surrounding Philby, but cultivated him nonetheless, at first guardedly, later wholeheartedly. The American concluded Philby was ‘much too sophisticated to give his allegiance to such a doctrinaire business as Marxism’, and besides, the Anglophile Applewhite ‘liked to talk to Philby about Arab problems’ and enjoyed the Englishman’s erudite company. The American intelligence community was, if anything, even more welcoming to Philby than the British one, for this charming, open-handed Englishman seemed trustworthy, the sort of Englishman who had helped America to win the Second World War and was now helping her to win the Cold War. ‘Philby was friendly with all the Yanks in Beirut,’ George Young later noted. ‘A lot of them babbled. He was pretty good at getting them to talk.’

  One American spy talked more than any of the others, and would be drawn into the heart of the Philby-Elliott circle. Miles Copeland Jr was a drawling jazz musician from the Deep South, a wartime spy, former CIA agent and now a public relations executive and espionage fixer. The son of a doctor from Birmingham, Alabama, Copeland had spent his teenage years gambling on the riverboats, before dramatically changing tack and heading to Alabama University to study advanced mathematics. A gifted trumpeter, he played in an otherwise all-black radio band, and ended up in the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Copeland joined the OSS soon after Pearl Harbor, and headed to London with the other young Americans eager to learn the spying game. There he became a close friend of James Angleton (who left him a bequest in his will) and went on to become one of the most effective – and dubious – operatives in the CIA: he helped to organise a coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, and tried to steer his friend Colonel Nasser of Egypt away from Moscow. Copeland shared Angleton’s views of America’s role in the world, believing that the CIA had a right and a duty to steer political and economic events in the Middle East: ‘The United States had to face and define its policy in all three sectors that provided the root causes of American interests in the region: the Soviet threat, the birth of Israel, and petroleum.’ By 1956 he was living in Beirut, a partner in the industrial consultancy and PR firm Copeland and Eichelberger, no longer officially in the CIA but alert to every aspect of agency activities, with access to the daily cables passing through Applewhite’s office. So far from hiding his intelligence links, Copeland paraded them as part of his business pitch.