‘We need to discover what damage he caused,’ Dick White told Macmillan. ‘A full damage report with all the details of how the Russians had operated and who else was working with Philby is of great importance.’ Besides, though he might be a traitor, Philby ‘should be treated as a gentleman’. White sketched out a plan of action that would cause least embarrassment, while yielding maximum benefit: Arthur Martin should fly to Beirut as soon as possible, present Philby with the conclusive evidence against him, and then offer him a way out: immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession and complete cooperation. No such deal had been offered to George Blake; but then Blake, a foreigner, was not a gentleman. Macmillan agreed to the plan, but insisted on total secrecy: ‘Keep a lid on things,’ he instructed Dick White. The Attorney-General and the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office also approved the plan, though they were careful to commit nothing to paper. MI5 compiled a ‘voluminous brief in preparation for the confrontation’, which Martin studied as he prepared for the showdown in Beirut: he would break Philby, extract the truth, and destroy him once and for all. The only obstacle to this happy scenario was Nicholas Elliott.
Within days of his return to London, Elliott was summoned to see Dick White, and told, with some relish, that there could no longer be any doubt: Flora Solomon’s evidence confirmed that Philby had been a Soviet spy since the early 1930s. He had betrayed his country, his class and his club; he had lied to MI5 and MI6, the CIA and FBI, to his family, friends and colleagues; he had deceived everyone, egregiously, brilliantly, for more than thirty years. But no one had been betrayed more comprehensively than Nicholas Elliott.
Elliott had been just twenty-four, grieving over the death of Basil Fisher, when he was befriended and beguiled by Philby, a man he had then trusted, revered and supported throughout his adult life. Their lives had seemed to run in tandem, through public school, Cambridge and MI6, overlapping professionally, culturally and geographically. From St Albans to Istanbul, Elliott had modelled himself on Philby: his spycraft, his air of worldly irony, his umbrella with the ebony handle. They seldom discussed their fears, or hopes, for theirs was a most English friendship, founded on cricket, alcohol and jokes, based on a shared set of assumptions about the world, and their privileged place in it. They were as close as two heterosexual, upper-class, mid-century Englishmen could be. Elliott’s loyalty was of the military type, an unquestioning readiness to stand by a comrade under fire: he had valued this friendship forged in wartime above all else. Now, for the first time, he began to count its cost, to wonder how many people he, James Angleton and others had unwittingly condemned to death. Some of the victims had names: the German anti-communist Catholics identified by the Vermehrens; the Volkovs in Istanbul; the young Georgians slipped across the Turkish border to their deaths; perhaps even Buster Crabb’s strange death could be attributed to Philby. Many casualties remain nameless: the multiple agents infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain, and never seen again; the Albanian ‘pixies’, captured and killed in their hundreds, along with their families; the unknown number of agents exposed in the Middle East. Elliott would never be able to calculate the precise death tally, for who can remember every conversation, every confidence exchanged with a friend stretching back three decades? The weekends at the cricket, the evenings at the club, the nights on the town in Beirut: it had all been a charade, the simulacrum of comradeship, while Philby gathered information for his Soviet masters. Elliott had given away almost every secret he had to Philby; but Philby had never given away his own.
Elliott’s emotions on discovering Philby’s betrayal can only be surmised, for he preferred not to discuss them. His upper lip remained ramrod stiff. He came from a generation of Englishmen who believed that feelings are a sign of weakness, to be suppressed, ignored or laughed off. A different sort of man might have buckled under the pain, but Elliott was tough, and a dissembler in his own way, for British breeding and schooling produce a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty. As John le Carré once wrote, the privately educated Englishman ‘is the greatest dissembler on earth . . . Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool . . . He can have a Force Twelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue and you may be his best friend but you’ll never be the wiser.’ Elliott had survived a brutal prep school, the chilliness of his father, the death of his first friend, by pretending that everything was perfectly all right. And he survived Philby’s intimate betrayal in exactly the same way. But those who knew him best saw that beneath the ever-languid manner, the armoury of jokes and the insouciant air, from the moment he finally understood and accepted Philby’s treachery, Elliott’s world changed utterly: inside, he was crushed, humiliated, enraged and saddened. For the rest of his life, he would never cease to wonder how a man to whom he had felt so close, and so similar in every way, had been, underneath, a fraud. Once, he would have died for Philby; now, as he told his son, he would ‘happily have killed him’. Philby had made a first-class fool of him and a mockery of their lifelong friendship; he had broken every canon of clubmanship and fraternity, and caused incalculable damage to the service, and the country, that Elliott loved. Elliott needed to know why. He wanted to look Philby in the eye one last time. He wanted to understand.
Elliott demanded to be allowed to confront Philby himself. He had known him more than half his life, and if anyone could extract a confession from the man, it was surely he. The idea appealed to Dick White. Elliott’s righteous anger might lend him additional moral weight, and ‘there was more chance that Philby could be persuaded to confess by an outraged sympathiser than by a stiff, lower-middle-class MI5 officer’. White calculated that since Elliott had been ‘Philby’s greatest supporter in 1951, his anger at having been betrayed would suggest that we had more proof than he realised’. In the past, White had been nettled by Elliott’s support for Philby, but he considered him ‘a proficient, clever and determined officer who would stop at nothing if the interests of the Crown required’. It was agreed: Elliott would fly out to Beirut, and nail Philby. The CIA was not informed about the proof of Philby’s guilt, or the decision to have Elliott confront him. The Americans could be informed once the case had been resolved. If James Angleton found out what was going on, he would certainly demand some involvement. The decision was made to keep him in the dark. Some wondered whether Elliott would be able to restrain his anger if he was allowed in the same room as the friend who had cheated him so thoroughly, but ‘Elliott swore not to exceed his brief, coldly angry though he now was’.
Peter Wright described the reaction inside MI5 to the news that MI6 was sending not the dogged Arthur Martin to confront Philby, but one of their own tribe.
The few of us inside MI5 privy to this decision were appalled. It was not simply a matter of chauvinism, though, not unnaturally, that played a part. We in MI5 had never doubted Philby’s guilt from the beginning, and now at last we had the evidence needed to corner him. Philby’s friends in MI6, Elliott chief among them, had continually protested his innocence. Now, when the proof was inescapable, they wanted to keep it in-house. The choice of Elliott rankled strongly.
To strengthen Elliott’s hand, Dick White told him that new evidence had been obtained from the defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, although exactly what he revealed remains a matter of conjecture, and some mystery. Golitsyn had not specifically identified Philby as ‘Agent Stanley’, but White gave Elliott the impression that he had. Was this intentional sleight of hand by White, allowing Elliott to believe that the evidence against Philby was stronger than it really was? Or did Elliott interpret as hard fact something that had only been implied? Either way, he prepared for his trip to Beirut in the certainty that Philby was bang to rights: ‘We’d fully penetrated the KGB, so we had confirmation.’ Elliott’s instructions were verbal, and only two men knew what they were: Dick White, and Nicholas Elliott himself.
In Beirut, Eleanor Philby watched in despair as her once-charming husband fell apart in a miasma of drink and depression. Philby was ‘vertically intoxicated, horizontally intoxicated’, and often intoxicated in solitude. ‘It was as if our flat was the only place he felt safe.’ When he did venture out for social events, he invariably ended up insensible. To her deep embarrassment he had to be bodily carried out of an embassy party. ‘He only had to smell a drink to set him off. His depression never seemed to lift,’ wrote Eleanor, who ‘groped to understand his tension and remoteness’. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked him repeatedly. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Oh nothing, nothing,’ he would reply.
Looking back, she realised that Philby’s desperate drinking, his search for alcoholic oblivion, was the mark of a man living in dread.
Philby’s journalism dried to a trickle. Peter Lunn noticed that Philby’s hands shook when they met for the first time. Philby insisted that if they should ever encounter each other at a social event, they should pretend to be strangers – a precaution that Lunn considered bizarre and unnecessary. After Elliott’s warmth, Eleanor found Lunn a ‘very cold fish indeed’.
On New Year’s Eve, Philby refused to go to any of the numerous Beirut parties on offer, and instead sat drinking champagne with Eleanor on the balcony of the flat, in gloomy silence. The next day was his fifty-first birthday, and Eleanor had planned a small midday drinks party. By 2.30, the guests had left. The Philbys intended to spend the day quietly at home, but then Miles Copeland appeared: ‘He dragged us protesting to an all-day New Year party given by some Americans.’ Philby had ‘already had a good deal to drink’, and became steadily drunker. As night fell, they staggered home to the Rue Kantari. Eleanor was preparing for bed, when she heard a loud crash from the bathroom, a cry of pain, and then another crash. Philby had fallen over, smashed his head on the radiator, lurched to his feet, and fallen again. ‘He was bleeding profusely from two great gashes on the crown of his head. The whole bathroom was spattered with blood.’ Eleanor wrapped his head in a towel, and rushed frantically to the telephone. Philby, dazed and still drunk, refused to leave the flat. Finally, a Lebanese doctor arrived and declared: ‘If we don’t get your husband to the hospital I will not be responsible for his life.’ Philby was coaxed into the lift and driven to the American University hospital, where he was stitched up and sedated. A doctor took Eleanor aside and told her gravely that with ‘one more ounce of alcohol in his blood, he would have been dead’.
Philby insisted on returning home that night. He cut a pathetic figure, in a blood-stained dressing gown, with two livid black eyes and a turban of bandages around his head. ‘I was a bloody fool,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going on the wagon – forever.’
A week later, Nick Elliott broke the journey to Beirut in Athens, where he met Halsey Colchester, the MI6 station chief, and his wife Rozanne, valued friends from Istanbul days. Elliott had already ‘prepared himself for a battle of wits he was determined to win’, but he needed to unburden himself before heading on to Beirut. ‘I’ve got an awful task,’ he told Halsey and Rozanne. ‘I’ve got to beard him.’ Like Elliott, the Colchesters had long admired and defended Philby, and they were stunned by the proof of his guilt. ‘It was a terrible shock to hear he was this awful spy. He was always so nice, so affable and intelligent.’
Rozanne had known Elliott as a carefree spirit – ‘he always laughed about things’ – but over dinner in Athens, he was deadly serious, anxious and anguished. Rozanne’s account of that night is a picture of a man facing the worst moment of his life.
Nicholas knew he had blood on his hands. He knew Philby so well, and he was horrified by the whole thing. He said he wouldn’t mind shooting him. He didn’t know what he was going to say, and I remember him coaching himself: ‘There’s no pretending now. We know who you are.’ Nick was usually a very funny man. Like an actor or entertainer, you never felt he was quite real. One never really felt one knew him. Nicholas had that English way of not getting too involved, a sort of façade with endless jokes. But that night he was very highly strung. He was dreading it, and it was quite dangerous. He thought he might have been shot by Philby, or the Soviets. ‘I hope he doesn’t take a pot shot,’ he said. He talked obsessively about Philby, about how he had known him so well. He didn’t have to go through the ordeal, but he wanted to. It was really quite brave. He wanted to make sure for himself.
Elliott arrived in Beirut on 10 January 1963, and checked into a small, discreet hotel, far from the usual haunts of the spies and journalists. Only Peter Lunn knew he was in the city. Together they prepared the ground for the confrontation. Lunn’s secretary had an apartment in the Christian quarter, near the sea. The sitting room was carefully bugged by an MI6 technician with a hidden microphone under the sofa, and a wire running to a tape-recorder in the next-door room. Elliott bought a bottle of brandy. When everything was ready, Lunn telephoned Philby and ‘in a casual voice’ suggested ‘a meeting between himself and Philby to discuss future plans’. He gave no hint that anything was amiss. Since Philby had himself stressed the need for security, Lunn suggested meeting over tea at his secretary’s flat, where they could chat in private. Philby had barely left the Rue Kantari since his drunken fall on New Year’s Day, but he agreed to meet Lunn at the appointed address the following afternoon. He later told Eleanor: ‘The minute that call came through, I knew the balloon was up.’
At four o’clock on 12 January, Philby, his head still swathed in bandages, and a little unsteady on his feet, climbed the stairs and knocked on the apartment door.
When it was opened by Nicholas Elliott, Philby seemed strangely unsurprised. ‘I rather thought it would be you,’ he said.
See Notes on Chapter 17
18
Teatime
Philby’s reaction to Elliott’s unannounced arrival in Beirut was interpreted, in the more paranoia-prone parts of MI5, as evidence that he had been tipped off in advance. It sparked a hunt for another Soviet spy within British intelligence that lasted two decades, and a conspiracy theory that still smoulders today. In reality, when Philby said he was not surprised to find Elliott waiting for him at the flat, he was stating a fact. He had feared exposure for years, and expected it imminently; he knew how Elliott’s mind worked, and he knew that if the truth about his spying had finally emerged, then Elliott would want to confront him with it.
The two men shook hands. Elliott inquired about the bandage on Philby’s head. Philby explained that he had fallen over after a party. The embassy secretary poured tea, and then discreetly left the apartment. The two men sat down, for all the world as if they were meeting in the club. In the next room, Peter Lunn and a stenographer, both wearing headphones, hunched over a turning tape-recorder.
The full transcript of the ensuing dialogue has never been released by MI5. Indeed, parts of the recording are almost inaudible; Elliott was no technical expert. Shortly before Philby’s arrival, he had opened the apartment windows and as a result, much of their dialogue is obscured by the sounds wafting up from the busy Beirut street below. One of the most important conversations in the history of the Cold War takes place to the accompaniment of car horns, grinding engines, Arabic voices and the faint clink of china teacups. But enough could be heard to reconstruct what followed: a display of brutal English politeness, civilised and lethal.
Elliott asked after Philby’s health.
‘Perfectly tolerable,’ said Philby, adding that he was recovering from a double bout of flu and bronchitis. ‘They were both against me.’
Philby asked after Elliott’s family. All well, said Elliott. Mark was starting the new term at Eton.
‘Wonderful tea,’ he said.
A pause.
‘Don’t tell me you flew all the way here to see me?’ said Philby.
Elliott took out his Mont Blanc pen, placed it on the table, and began to roll it back and forth under his palm. It was an act of nervous tension, but also an old interrogation trick
, a distraction.
‘Sorry for getting right on with it. Kim, I don’t have time to postpone this. And we’ve known each other for ever, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll get right to the point,’ said Elliott, not getting to the point. ‘Unfortunately it’s not very pleasant.’ Another pause. ‘I came to tell you that your past has caught up with you.’
A Spy Among Friends Page 28
