2

THE COST OF BETRAYAL

A violent banging on his front door summoned Anthony Cavendish from a deep slumber. It was three in the morning. He was MI6’s liaison officer with the Royal Navy in Hamburg in the British zone of Germany, a city out of which operations at the northern end of the Iron Curtain were run.1 At the door he found one of his radio operators in a visibly distressed state. There was a problem that required his urgent attention. The previous night, Cavendish and a fellow officer had taken three Baltic agents to the red-light district of Hamburg. The men, plucked from refugee camps, had been offered a last indulgence before embarking on a secret mission. It should have been relatively safe since they had been led to a bar in the Reeperbahn where the manager was an informant for Field Security. When Cavendish had retired for the night, the men had still been enjoying themselves, knocking back a peculiar German brandy drink and talking to some over-made-up girls while they watched the floor show. But the radio operator explained that, although two of the agents had made it back to their own secluded safe house, the third and the MI6 officer ‘looking after him’ had got into a fight.

Cavendish threw on some clothes and headed for the bar. He found it smashed up. The police had taken everyone involved to the station. Cavendish persuaded them to release his two men, but there followed a long, painful post-mortem to ensure that the agents’ cover story as visiting businessmen had not been blown. This was the inauspicious prelude to one of MI6’s most aggressive and ill-fated operations of the early Cold War, which, along with many others, would be betrayed.

A day or so later, when the weather had improved, the agents were taken down to a jetty at a nearby harbour. Waiting for them was a German called Helmut Klose. During the war he had captained E-boats which dropped Germans behind Russian lines to carry out acts of sabotage. He knew every nook and cranny of the stretch of coast along the Baltic. A German boat had been purchased by MIE and taken back to Portsmouth to be kitted out with a new engine which offered fifty knots with barely a sound. Klose’s cover was as part of the British Control Commission’s Fishery Protection Service.

Cavendish’s job had been to establish a safe house, look after the agents and liaise with the Royal Navy. His naval contact was Anthony Courtney, a bluff officer whose remarkable career would take him back and forth between Moscow and London, from the netherworld of intelligence to the bright lights of parliament, and end in disaster at the hands of the KGB. Courtney was perhaps unique among British intelligence officers in having donated blood to the Red Army.2 His father had once sold machine tools to the Russians and would return from trips to the Soviet Union with beautifully carved wooden bears and books full of fairy stories. They were impenetrable to his son but had contributed to an abiding fascination with all things Russian, including its women.

After joining the navy, Courtney was one of the few Westerners to visit the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, a period when he was also in touch with MI6. He wrote up long reports for Naval Intelligence with details ranging from the battleships he saw to how many roubles a month a waiter earned. He also drafted papers on what operations could be mounted against the Soviets in the Arctic and Black Sea in the event of war. ‘I’m afraid I have rather violent ideas on what we really could do to the USSR if we tried,’ he wrote in a 1936 report.³ His experience led to a posting as deputy head of the Naval Mission in Moscow during the war, sailing the Arctic to Murmansk through storms violent enough to detonate mines around the boat. Those years in Moscow were filled with frustration and obstruction but he managed not only to donate blood in an act of solidarity but also to embark on an affair with a Russian dancer at the Bolshoi, which lasted until the secret police warned her off.⁴

After the war, he advised MI6 on the use of fast surface craft and special submarines for operations in the Black Sea. In 1948, he had been made chief of intelligence staff to the Flag Office in Germany living with his wife in a house with a pool and tennis court, although he repeatedly complained of a lack of money. Germany offered him the chance to run his own front-line operations as he learnt how German fast boats could be adapted to slip quietly and quickly out of smaller harbours.

Courtney had approached Helmut Klose in May 1949. Klose had not been a Nazi, but Courtney explained to him that his wartime activities had been discovered and suggested he might like to undertake similar work again.5 No pressure was needed since Klose proved happy to resume his duel with the Bolsheviks. Courtney’s deputy was John Harvey Jones, later chairman of ICI and TV trouble-shooter, who had joined Naval Intelligence after studying Russian at Cambridge.

After a few false starts, Klose’s white E-boat, S-208, carrying Cavendish’s Baltic agents finally headed out from the harbour on 31 October 1949. Its destination was Latvia, which had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union during the war. The men included former members of the SS whose past had been conveniently overlooked. MI6 was fighting the new war as if it were the last one, finding exiles to drop behind enemy lines. These men had been trained in weapons and secret inks back in Britain, including at a firing range in Chelsea. They carried a brown suitcase containing radios, machine guns and pistols. In watertight plastic bags they had codebooks and false passports. They had money belts full of gold coins and each carried a cyanide pill in case of capture.⁶

The Latvian drop was not the first. The Baltic coast, MI6 believed, was a weak point in the Iron Curtain. British intelligence had studied it closely. They knew it was guarded by camouflaged watchtowers, concealed lookouts and guard patrols, but these were at irregular intervals. The area closest to the shore had been evacuated and islands declared prohibited zones. Fishing vessels had informers placed on board and were scrutinised by coastal cutters, which guarded the boundary with the British sea zone.⁷ MI6 had already tried similar missions to Lithuania but these had ended in disaster with a KGB ambush on the beach.

Klose dropped the men at an isolated spot. They made their way to the house of a priest and gave him their password: ‘Can I buy some beer here?’ The agents radioed back to Hamburg that their mission had started well. They headed for Riga and knocked on another door. They had arrived to help the resistance in the forests, they explained. The next day, their contact said he was going out to get food. Instead he got in touch with a man called Janis Lukasevics. ‘They’re comfortable and feel quite at home,’ he told Lukasevics.8

The Baltic operations were masterminded by a brooding, secrecy-obsessed MI6 controller in London called Harry Carr. With an arched nose, intense eyes and straight black hair, Carr was the leading member of a group of MI6 officers for whom the Second World War had been only a brief interruption in their single-minded struggle against the real enemy. Back in the nineteenth century, the Russians had been Britain’s rivals as the first intelligence skirmishes were fought as part of the Great Game in Asia. The imperial roots of anti-Russian sentiment in the Secret Service were then supplemented by a deep distaste for Bolshevism and its class struggle. For Harry Carr, the appropriation of property was also personal. He had been born in the northern Russian port of Archangel in the last weeks of the nineteenth century. His father managed timber mills and Carr grew up in luxury with a grass tennis court and servants before everything was taken away by the Bolsheviks.⁹ A remarkable number of MI6 officers had links to the old Russia either personally or through marriage. This created a highly motivated faction who were emotionally committed to confronting the Soviets. In the 1920s they had fallen foul of a Soviet deception called the Trust – a fake émigré group which acted as flypaper to trap agents. But Carr and his like had not learnt their lesson. A doer, not a thinker, Carr demanded aggressive operations. ‘There was a philosophy which affected almost everything they did which was “We must do something. Never mind what – but something,’” recalls a colleague who worked in Carr’s department just after the war.¹⁰

Carr was among those itching to start operations against the Soviets after the Second World War and chafing at the restrictions initially imposed by the government on operating inside Russia. Eventually, the leash was loosened and it was agreed that operations could be launched from outside the Soviet Union into its perimeter.¹¹

One of those was the effort to support the partisans in the Baltic forests. But an ambitious KGB major called Janis Lukasevics was waiting. He had interrogated a group of Latvians who had landed as early as 1945 and by the time more groups landed in 1949, including those shepherded by Courtney and Cavendish, he was ready to enmesh them in his web of deception.12 The real partisans had been almost totally crushed by the Soviet secret police, and six of his KGB officers would pose as fake partisans. ‘We put them in a safe place,’ Lukasevics recalled decades later of the team dropped in October. ‘There was a decision not to touch them.’¹³

The newly arrived agents were hidden under fish boxes in a truck and taken to meet their fellow ‘forest brothers’. Deep in the woods, the MI6 agents spent months training the ‘partisans’ and gave them codenames. They told them they would receive £20 a month paid into a London bank account. At one point, one of the MI6 agents put his arm around the shoulders of a ‘partisan’ and confided that in the first few weeks he had been worried it was all a KGB trap. They began to supply information back to London – profiles of people, troop movements and factory production – nothing special but good enough to be included in MI6’s weekly intelligence summary for the Foreign Office. More agents arrived, including another undercover KGB man planted to report back on every element of the operation.¹⁴ Over five years, Klose would drop many more agents into the Baltics. The KGB would capture and in some cases torture and kill them. MI6 had been ensnared. It had been betrayed. Who was to blame?

At the same time as the Latvian operation was under way at the northernmost reaches of the Iron Curtain, an even more ambitious, but equally ill-fated, covert action was being undertaken by MI6 at the southern end. On the moonless night of 3 October 1949, a boat called the Stormie Seas lay 200 yards off a cove on the Albanian coast. A group of men climbed into a rubber dinghy and rowed ashore.¹⁵ Hidden by darkness, the landing spot was a remote ravine at the bottom of cliffs with a goat track leading up the scrub-covered mountain. One of the men thought he spotted a light, but a few seconds later it disappeared. When a British marine brought the second half of the team over in his dinghy, he found the first arrivals still waiting, unsure of what lay in store for them in the dark. He ushered them up the hillside. ‘They all just mooched off,’ he later recalled. ‘We’d let them down very badly.’¹⁶

The nine men again split into two groups. Within hours, one group was ambushed and three of its four members killed. The others made contact with villagers who told them that soldiers had been in the area for several days. The Albanian security forces had been preparing for weeks. Their networks of informers had been told to be on the lookout.17 At a radio station in Corfu the MI6 team running the operation began to panic as days passed with no contact. Slowly messages trickled back and a few survivors made it into Greece to report the bad news. A second team that went in had likewise been expected and had fallen into a trap.

These teams’ objective was to get a feel for the population in preparation for toppling the Albanian government.¹⁸ The losses were bad but not bad enough to put off those who had decided that this was the way in which the Cold War was to be fought. There were late-night conferences to work out what had gone wrong. Sitting in a secure office in the Pentagon, monitoring those first drops, one American said there had to be a leak. His counterpart, the newly arrived liaison from MI6, whom the Americans found comfortingly English and only mildly eccentric by his colleagues’ standards, remained quiet.¹⁹ The culture of the times, one MI6 officer recalled, was to meet every setback with the cry ‘not to worry, bash on regardless’.²⁰

The USSR was seen by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee in 1948 as a ‘hostile, messianic state, with a world-wide mission of hastening the elimination of capitalism’.²¹ Albania had been identified by both MI6 and the CIA as a weak spot in the Communist front and in February 1949 the decision had been taken to make it the test case to ‘roll back’ Communism, a policy in many ways as aggressive as anything the KGB was attempting. All means short of war were on the table.

Britain had one problem. Money – or a lack of it. The country was broke. The solution was obvious: the Americans. They did not take much persuasion. Britain was retreating from centre-stage and passing the baton. In February 1947, London had informed Washington that its economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey would have to stop because Britain was approaching bankruptcy. Given the danger that those countries would fall to Communism, the US President announced the Truman Doctrine offering support to all ‘free people who are resisting subjugation’. This was followed by the Marshall Plan to offer economic aid to prevent Communist influence. It was accompanied by a vast increase in propaganda and covert action, including the backing of émigré groups and the financing of anti-Communist political parties in places like Italy where enormous effort had been expended to ‘win’ the election in 1948. The vogue phrase to describe this was ‘political warfare’. It ranged from propaganda to manipulating commodity prices, from counterfeiting currency to sabotage, from bankrolling émigré front organisations to dropping leaflets from hot-air balloons (some of which, destined for Czechoslovakia, were discovered by Scottish farmers, much to their bemusement).22

Albania was a test case for the most aggressive end of the political-warfare spectrum. The British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, a fierce anti-Communist thanks to his battles inside the trade unions, was a supporter. There were differences in emphasis between London and Washington, particularly over who to back. In one discussion with US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Bevin uttered that great British battlecry: ‘Are there any Kings around that could be put in?’²³ Not everyone in the Foreign Office and State Department was keen on the plan, but MI6 found an enthusiastic backer in Washington in the form of Frank Wisner, known as ‘the wiz’. A former corporate lawyer from Mississippi, he was smitten with the idea of using covert operations to take on the Soviets. From an office known as the ‘rat palace’ because of the vermin scuttling through its corridors, he ran the Office of Policy Co-ordination, which was tasked with fighting the secret war, a role he continued after the OPC was absorbed into the CIA in 1950. By 1951, Wisner was spending more than $200 million a year on his covert operations, three times the money spent on collecting and analysing intelligence.

MI6 and the CIA have always had two functions – information gathering and covert action. The latter involves engineering outcomes with the hand of government hidden. For Wisner and his people, intelligence was about doing things, not finding out about things. ‘The central and decisive battles of the secret war are fought in the vast realm of covert political operations,’ wrote James McCargar, who led the American side of the Albanian operation. ‘The ultimate national aim in the secret war is not simply to know; it is to maintain or to expand national power.’²⁴ Not everyone agreed. ‘The operational tail will wag the intelligence dog,’ one American spy chief warned.²⁵ But the CIA, even more than MI6, came to be infused with a paramilitary culture and enthused by the possibilities that covert action offered. The US was deciding there was only one way to play against an implacable, deadly new enemy hell-bent on domination. ‘There are no rules in such a game,’ an official report argued in language that would be echoed after 9/11. ‘Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered … We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.’26 (‘We cannot afford methods less ruthless than those of our opposition,’ a fictional British intelligence man argues in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.)

Bankrolling Britain’s Albania plan was no problem for the cash-rich American spies who operated a slush fund siphoned out of the Marshall Plan money with almost no oversight.²⁷ How the cash-strapped British Secret Service housed in the Broadway buildings by St James’s tube station, with its brown linoleum floors, grotty furnishings and bare lightbulbs, must have gazed in envy at the wealth of its younger, brasher cousin. Beneath the surface, a few in Washington detected a sour resentment of the Americans, particularly among some upper-class Britons, who disliked the passing of the baton and the anti-imperial instincts of their cousins.

The awareness of no longer being top dog and of being reliant on American largesse was expressed in the fictional writings of one of Anthony Courtney’s friends and former colleagues from Naval Intelligence who, just as the Albania operation reached its zenith, was writing his first book. ‘Our people are definitely interested. They think it’s just as important as your friends do and they don’t think there’s anything crazy about it all. In fact, Washington’s pretty sick we’re not running the show,’ the CIA man explained to James Bond. Just as Bond’s British operation, fought at the baccarat table of Casino Royale rather than in the Albanian mountains, looked lost, CIA man Felix Leiter slides an envelope across the table, ‘thick as a dictionary’, with the words ‘Marshall Aid. Thirty-two million francs. With the compliments of the USA’, allowing Bond to win the day and bankrupt his enemy. In Ian Fleming’s fantasy world, the British were still in charge even if they did need American money. This was an escapist alternative reality in which the British reader could be consoled by the thought that, even as the days of Empire and greatness were passing, Britain was still good at something, a world in which the illusions of power and influence could be preserved in the form of a cool and ruthless superspy.28

In the real Albanian operation, the exchange was not quite so one sided. In return for American cash, Britain could offer two things – a claim (only partly true) to have wisdom and expertise on Albania and also, crucially, real estate from which to run the operation. Leftover bits of Empire, from Cyprus to Hong Kong and later Diego Garcia, always came in useful and the Americans’ propensity for favouring decolonisation certainly had its limits. ‘Whenever we want to subvert any place,’ Frank Wisner confided to an MI6 officer he wrongly believed was on his side, ‘we find that the British own an island within easy reach.’²⁹ For Albania, the island was Malta.

The cultural differences between the two countries’ spies are captured in McCargar’s account of attending planning meetings on either side of the Atlantic. In Washington, he arrived to find an intricate bureaucratic, organisational chart on the wall for the Albanian operation. ‘A colleague pointed at it and said we’d need 457 bodies. I didn’t think we could find 457 bodies and said that I would happily settle for six brains,’ McCargar recalled. A week later he went to London to confer. After an hour or two someone said, ‘I say, why don’t we get old Henry up here? He knows about this.’ ‘A day or two later old Henry showed up from down in Sussex and when the problem was put to him, finally agreed to undertake the task, although, as he said, “This will wreak havoc with the garden, you know. Just getting it into trim.”’ He then said he needed a grand total of six people to report to him.³⁰

The ‘old Henrys’ of the Albania operation were a group of Special Operations Executive (SOE) veterans who would become known as the Musketeers. During the war, the SOE had sent in men and weapons to support Albanians fighting first against the Italians and then against the Germans. There had been a sharp and bitter division between those who favoured the Communist-allied partisans and those who worked with the nationalists and royalists and who favoured the exiled King Zog (who had been ensconced for much of the war in the front line of Henley-on-Thames). The partisans had proved more willing to take on the Germans and eventually their pudgy leader Enver Hoxha had emerged triumphant, installing a Communist government which, in turn, distrusted the British for their backing of his rivals. ‘Another King down the drain!’ Churchill wrote to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden when Hoxha’s victory became apparent.31

The SOE veterans who had worked with the nationalists were bitter at the turn of events. They talked angrily of treachery and of the machinations of the Communist sympathisers among their rivals within SOE. The key figures included Julian Amery, later a Conservative minister, Billy McLean and David Smiley – ‘the Three Musketeers’. After the war Amery had worked the overlapping worlds of Whitehall offices and the clubs of St James’s in which the demimonde of British intelligence and its hangers-on lived, telling everybody who would listen that the Albanian people were ‘seething with discontent against their Communist masters’.³² The Musketeers believed that their SOE experience of training and supporting resistance groups was the way to fight the new Cold War, without realising that this time the enemy was playing a different game. SOE had been swallowed up by MI6 which in turn had absorbed its gung-ho culture. New recruits into MI6 were trained, in classic SOE style, to place explosives by a railway line as much as to recruit agents. A divide had emerged in the culture of MI6, just as it had among their American counterparts, between those who wanted action and those who wanted intelligence. The men of action, who believed in continuing the paramilitary methods they had enjoyed in the Second World War, had the upper hand in these years. These were the men who had ‘had a good war’ and could not let go. The Chief of MI6 was unsure about the Albania operation, saying there was no point in undertaking it unless it was followed through, but he also saw it as a way of keeping the SOE ‘stinks and bangs people’ happy.³³

Colonel and Musketeer David Smiley was in charge of training the Albanians. His name crops up again and again in accounts of the clandestine wars fought by Britain from the Second World War onwards (making it perhaps ironic that a man of action not dissimilar to Bond coincidentally enjoyed the same name as le Carré’s pudgy, cerebral spy). He had been commissioned into the full plumage of the Royal Horse Guards – a world of strict formality in which he was once reprimanded for being seen at the Café de Paris wearing a dinner jacket when he should have been in white tie and tails.34 As the Second World War began, he sold his racehorse and private aeroplane and moved into irregular warfare. In 1943, he had been recruited to work for SOE in Albania, parachuting out of a Halifax bomber. He first worked with Hoxha, whom Smiley, being an old-fashioned British imperialist, argued with incessantly, before switching to the more amenable nationalist Abas Kupi. A few years after the war, an old SOE colleague now with MI6 explained that the old crew was getting back together for one more adventure.³⁵

In the summer of 1949 Smiley arrived at the base of operations in Malta, an isolated hill-top fort, equipped with drawbridge and moat. He lived under cover and spent the mornings at an office being as conspicuous as possible. Summer afternoons were for playing polo, sometimes with Admiral Mountbatten and his nephew Prince Philip accompanied occasionally by his wife, the then Princess Elizabeth, who stayed on the island for a while. When the Princess was crowned queen a few years later, Smiley rode alongside as commander of her escort.³⁶

The Albanian agents had been recruited from Displaced Persons camps and were trained by Smiley’s team of weapons experts, wireless operators and even an Oxford don who was a scholar of classical Persian. The technology was equally quirky. The batteries for the old Second World War radio sets they had were too large so they used a type of collapsible bicycle without wheels. Someone would have to pedal furiously to generate enough power to send a signal.

By July 1950, a specially fitted private yacht, the Henrietta, had replaced the Stormie Seas. ‘We would be alongside in Malta and a taxi [with] four hooded characters would arrive,’ remembers Eric Walton, who sailed the boat.³⁷ ‘They arrived on board blindfolded … We would take off and disappear knowing full well that the Russians or some other spies would know we were going. But what they didn’t know was that we could do 25 knots and we had long-range tanks.’ The team acquired a local reputation as top-notch smugglers, and a Greek shipping magnate even asked them to smuggle some gold in return for 10 per cent of the proceeds. The team declined.³⁸ Walton, like many involved, felt growing sympathy for the hooded men, who came to be known as the pixies. When one died in Malta, they had to dispose of the corpse without any records and dumped the body at sea. But it was their fate on landing in Albania that really elicited sympathy even among the hard-headed MI6 men.

The mood soured as the pixies were repeatedly ambushed on arrival. And yet the operations continued. Tony Northrop, a young MI6 officer who trained the pixies in Malta, became depressed as he watched them sail off. Lives were being thrown away, he thought.39 When one pixie disappeared from training, Northrop found him sitting on a bench in the town square. As Northrop approached, the man put his hand to his mouth. Northrop realised he was trying to swallow the cyanide pill he had been given for the mission. Northrop grabbed him by the throat and rushed him to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Northrop became so disillusioned that he told his superiors the whole thing was doomed. But still the drops continued. Too much had been invested to admit failure and turn back. ‘They had no country and no future,’ Smiley later recalled. ‘I feel very sad, to be quite frank. Looking back knowing the result, it is just heartbreaking.’⁴⁰

The Americans began in 1950 to drop their men into Albania by parachute, the planes coming in at just 200 feet to evade radar before rising to 500 feet for the jump. Washington’s political strategy had fallen apart amid interminable Albanian feuds and their agents’ fate was the same as the British. They had been expected and were surrounded, some burnt to death in a house, others shot, others captured. The Albanians, like the Latvians, began running a deception operation, forcing agents to broadcast the all-clear, leading to more agents being lured to their deaths. ‘Our famous radio game brought about the ignominious failure of the plans of the foreign enemy,’ Hoxha later boasted. ‘The bands of criminals who were dropped in by parachute or infiltrated across the border at our request came like lambs to the slaughter.’⁴¹

In London, they knew something was going wrong. George Kennedy Young, back from Vienna, began post-mortems on the Iron Curtain operations, ‘the pride and joy’ of some parts of the office.⁴² Using so-called ‘barium meals’ in which false information is fed into a network to see where it ends up, he became convinced they were being run by the KGB. This led to furious rows with Carr and his allies who simply did not want to accept that they had been duped. The Chief, John Sinclair, who was out of his depth, ignored the warnings. The British began to pull back, realising that the Albanian operation – codenamed ‘Valuable’ – was anything but and risked fuelling Stalin’s paranoia. Britain, having initially feared American disengagement from Europe and a return to isolationism, was also beginning to worry that perhaps the Americans were a bit too reckless and might start a war, a war in which London, not Washington, would be obliterated.

Covert operations had fanned out beyond the Baltic States and Albania to the entire periphery of the Soviet Union including Ukraine and the Caucasus. And they all seemed to be going wrong at enormous cost in terms of lives, manpower and money.43 Eventually, the Albanians revealed their hand in a Tirana show-trial, providing the perfect pretext for Hoxha to tighten his grip. The game was up. It had gone on too long. And at the cost of many lives, maybe 100, maybe 200. But these were foreigners and volunteers who knew the risks, the British and American intelligence officers said. And this was a war.

There were recriminations. The British thought that the Americans had been a bit amateurish. ‘I was quite convinced our security was very, very tight,’ reckoned Smiley. But the Americans thought there had been a leak. The operation had been betrayed. Who was to blame? There was an elusively simple answer to the conundrum of not just Latvia and Albania but all of the other failed MI6 operations of this period.

As the first team were setting sail from Malta, an MI6 officer was on a much more comfortable boat journey, heading towards New York and enjoying a crate of champagne that had been delivered to his cabin. It had taken just half an hour for Kim Philby to agree to accept the position of British liaison to American intelligence which took him to the fulcrum of the secret world. He knew it was precisely what his masters in Moscow would have wanted. He had spent September inside MI6 HQ at Broadway in London being briefed on current operations, including Albania, ahead of his new posting. When he arrived, he was taken to a hotel overlooking Central Park. As he gazed out of the twenty-fifth-floor window, Philby felt sick and broke into a sweat.⁴⁴

On the day the second team landed in Albania in October 1949, Philby formally took up his job. The US no longer wanted to be as reliant on the UK as it had been in the Second World War, but the British were still the ‘big brother’ who had been in the game much longer. Philby met frequently with the head of the CIA and its staff gossiped freely with him. ‘Philby was a great charmer,’ McCargar recalled. ‘He came to us with an enormous reputation. He was known as a young Turk … and the American bureaucracy sometimes admires that kind of thing … one had the feeling one could have confidence in him.’45

Every week, Philby would lunch with James Jesus Angleton, an increasingly influential figure in American intelligence. A wiry man with thick glasses, who grew orchids and studied poetry, Angleton cultivated an aura of being cleverer and better at playing the game of intrigue than anyone else. Educated in England and at Yale, he had known Philby during the war and, like others, admired him as a ‘professional’. In Washington, the two men drank Martinis and ate lobster at Harvey’s Restaurant as each cultivated the other and traded secret information, Philby even going to Angleton’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.⁴⁶ The famous Philby charm worked on most, although a few sensed the driving ambition and coldness that lay beneath the surface. His house in Nebraska Avenue was the site for many a late-night party fuelled by pitchers of Martini. ‘They were long and very, very wet,’ McCargar recalls of those evenings. ‘We really were all afloat on a sea of drink.’⁴⁷ How much did Philby know? ‘The sky was the limit,’ a CIA officer from the time later remarked. ‘He would have known as much as he wanted to find out.’⁴⁸ One day, Ted Kollek, a visiting Israeli official, bumped into Philby in a corridor at CIA headquarters. ‘What is Philby doing here?’ he later asked Angleton. ‘Kim is a good friend of ours,’ Angleton replied. Kollek had been at Litzi and Philby’s wedding in Vienna back in 1934 when it was clear he had Communist sympathies. Don’t trust him, he warned Angleton. The warning was ignored.⁴⁹

Philby was one of four people co-ordinating the Iron Curtain operations to prevent agents running into each other and getting in each other’s way. He navigated the disputes between London and Washington over which exiles to back (the British liked kings, the Americans the republicans, and both argued over the use of war criminals). There was a particularly vicious battle between Harry Carr and Wisner’s people over factions in the Baltics which Philby had to smooth over.50

‘Do we know which of these operations is already under Russian control?’ a CIA officer asked Carr as they struggled to understand what was going wrong.

‘Ours isn’t,’ Carr replied.

‘How can you be sure that your agent isn’t under control?’ snapped the CIA officer.

‘We’re sure.’

‘But how can you be?’ persisted the American.

‘Because we’ve made our checks. Our group is watertight,’ Carr said.

‘So’s ours’, the American replied. ‘But one group is penetrated.’⁵¹

Philby was taking the minutes, cool as ever, knowing the answer. When their Albanian operations began to go wrong, Frank Wisner apologised to Philby and said, ‘We’ll get it right next time.’⁵²

Angleton, according to those who worked on the operation, gave Philby over drinks the precise co-ordinates for every drop zone for the CIA in Albania.⁵³ He may also have briefed Philby about all the other infiltration programmes behind the Iron Curtain. So everything was down to Philby.

That is the belief those involved clung to later. ‘What had happened was that bloody man Philby was tipping off,’ Smiley would say years later with a deep bitterness in his voice.⁵⁴ ‘The Americans had to tell us what they were doing and I had to tell the Americans what we were doing. This was all done through Washington and the go-between was this fellow Philby, who was told by the Americans what to tell the British, told the British what to tell the Americans. And told the Russians as well. It was a disaster.’ For Harry Carr too, it all must have been Philby. For a decade almost all the émigré operations into the USSR – from the Baltic to the Adriatic, with Poland and Ukraine along the way – had been run by the KGB. Everyone knew where to lay the blame. And the same for the Hungarian activists who ended up betrayed and jailed. And for the MI6 officers ambushed at dead drops. And for every other ill-conceived operation that ended in disaster during those years, the answer was always the same. It was all Philby. ‘We’d have been better off doing nothing,’ one CIA officer said of the years from 1945 to 1951.⁵⁵ One officer who worked on the operation said all of those involved in Albania at the agency were left ‘psychologically devastated’ when they eventually discovered what Philby had done to them.56

Philby, it was true, was perfectly placed. Through a ruthless power play, he had manoeuvred himself to become head of the newly formed Section IX in 1944. While Britain was still allied with the Soviet Union, this section was designed to prepare for MI6’s return to battle against Communism. Philby was the leading expert on Communist ideology in MI6, critiquing MI5’s papers on the USSR. ‘To my mind, the purge and the struggle against Fascism and collaboration is the current tactical expression of the class struggle,’ he wrote knowledgeably to his counterpart Roger Hollis at MI5, leading to a curious exchange between an MI6 man spying for the Soviets and a future head of MI5 who would be accused of doing the same.⁵⁷ Philby was able to use his position to report back to his controllers that the British were already thinking of the Soviets as a potential enemy during the war. He was fully aware of Harry Carr’s early plans for covert action. Intelligence derived not just from Philby but from his Cambridge cohorts reached Stalin personally and may well have further convinced him of the hostile intent of the West and the need to build up his own protective buffer of pliant states.

Philby had been engaged in a high-wire act of dizzying complexity. He had staffed his new section with officers who were good – but not too good. Every day he had to decide which operations to sabotage and which to let run in order to foster his own career. He did not pass everything to Moscow, not out of any residual patriotism but because he feared that his masters would not be careful enough in using it and it might lead back to him.⁵⁸ But he certainly betrayed the existence of the Albanian operations. Philby would later show no remorse over this. ‘The agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on sabotage, murder and assassination,’ he told a biographer years later. ‘They were quite as ready as I was to contemplate bloodshed in the service of a political ideal. They knew the risks they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union and those interests required that these men were defeated. To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.’⁵⁹ So it was all that bloody man Philby. Was it?

The truth is that the malaise affecting British intelligence was much greater than one man. Philby’s betrayal masked far more fundamental problems in the specific operations and in the whole culture of Anglo-American intelligence. The problems with the operations continued long after Philby had left Washington and when he was in no position to know the details. Cavendish, McCargar and others intimately involved knew he could not have been aware of all the landing times and places in the Albanian and Baltic operations. The operations were deeply flawed and compromised from the start, even without Philby. Security was lax. The Soviets had informers in all the refugee camps, in the front movements and in the networks themselves. Everyone everywhere knew what was happening inside the leaky émigré community where agents were recruited.60

Not just the execution but the very concept of the operation in Albania was fundamentally flawed. The Musketeers were personally committed to backing their men against the Communists. But they failed to appreciate that much of the support for Hoxha was based on real sentiment among the populace. And even as that sentiment began to sour, the strength of the secret police left others fearful of joining what always looked like a small-time attempt at revolution. The Soviets had much more to go on than just Philby.

The same was true for the Baltic operation. Philby may have kept the KGB informed of MI6’s deception plans but the operation had been organised separately. He had very little involvement with Carr’s work after 1947 apart from during his trips to Washington and knew almost none of the detail. All across Eastern Europe, the CIA and MI6 had begun to support resistance movements which had peaked in 1947 and by the time the parachutes and boats arrived they had dwindled to nothing, or worse, had become KGB traps. The methods of the last war were simply not up to the job this time round. MI6 did not yet have the measure of the new enemy it was facing.

It was all too convenient to blame every disaster on Philby in those years. He was a scapegoat who could be cast into the wilderness bearing the sins of Britain’s and America’s spies, leaving them free of blame. A few knew that it was not so simple. Philby’s betrayal was enormous. But it did not account for everything. His greatest damage lay in what his betrayal did to Washington’s perception of British intelligence and particularly in the manner of his departure.

In the summer of 1950, Philby received a letter from his old Cambridge friend Guy Burgess. He had been posted by the Foreign Office to Washington and wanted to stay at Philby’s house. This was a problem for Philby. He had first introduced Burgess to Russian intelligence in the 1930s and Burgess had repaid the favour by helping Philby into British intelligence during the Second World War. But Philby had been unsure about Burgess from the start and the once lovable rogue was becoming increasingly dissolute and dangerous.61 He left a trail of destruction wherever he went, from Tangier to Dublin, involving drunkenness, young men and occasional boasts of espionage.

At the same time, Philby had been briefed about an FBI investigation hunting for a spy who had been at the British Embassy. The FBI’s knowledge was only partial, based on a decrypted set of Soviet communications, and its officers had been inclined to think that the culprit was a junior or a local member of staff. A charlady with a Latvian grandmother had a fifteen-page report compiled on her private life. But Philby watched nervously as the investigation began to lead to another of his Cambridge contemporaries whom he had talent-spotted for the Soviets fifteen years earlier. Donald Maclean, once the golden boy of the Foreign Office, was by then back in London. After his time in Washington, he had begun to self-destruct in Cairo, thanks in part to a poor KGB handler looking after him. Fifteen years of deception had taken its toll. He wanted out. But it was too late. He trashed an American’s flat by smashing a large mirror on to a bath after a drinking binge. However, after a brief spell with the Foreign Office shrink he had been made head of the America desk. Now Philby, who never showed the same signs of cracking that his fellow spies did, could see the net closing in on Maclean.

Burgess would go back home to warn Maclean, he and Philby agreed. At the last dinner they would share, Burgess and Philby sat in a booth at a Chinese restaurant where music could mask their conversation. ‘When I drove him to the station next morning, my last words, spoken only half-jocularly, were “Don’t you go too.’”⁶² A few days later Philby was called in by a colleague at the Embassy who had just received a ‘Most Immediate’ telegram from London. Could Philby’s secretary help decrypt it? When the work was complete, the man looked grey. ‘“Kim,” he said in a half-whisper, “the bird (meaning Maclean) has flown … there’s worse than that … Guy Burgess has gone with him.’” Philby did not need to feign distress at the news. There was panic in London, where they had been waiting until the weekend was over to interrogate Maclean. The Soviets knew that the MI5 surveillance team did not work weekends and had taken advantage of this by sending their two agents on a weekend cruise to France which did not require passports. From there, they fled east.

Philby realised that the Cambridge connection between Burgess and Maclean would also lead to him. So he returned to his Washington home, went down into his basement and wrapped his secret camera and accessories into waterproof containers and drove out to Great Falls. He parked his car on a deserted stretch of road and began digging with a trowel to bury evidence of his deceit. But rather than panic and flee Philby decided to hold his nerve. He understood the Americans and the British spy-hunters in a way his two colleagues did not and he knew that any evidence would be circumstantial. He also understood that many senior people in London would not want to face up to the possibility that they had been duped, and that his many friends would give him the benefit of the doubt.

The summons to London soon arrived. On his way back, Philby went to see Angleton and they passed a ‘pleasant’ hour in a bar. He even saw CIA chief Allen Dulles, who acted as if it was business as usual and asked Philby to follow up some business back home.63 But while Angleton, despite what he later claimed, never had any doubts about his friend, other CIA colleagues did. One, Bill Harvey, wrote a memo outlining the circumstantial case that Philby had gone bad and sent it to Dulles. Washington had insisted to London that Philby leave and not come back.⁶⁴ Back in London, the first of many interrogations began. The initial task fell to the capable MI5 officer Dick White. Philby was a cool customer and knew that since his former friends at MI5 had no evidence they were counting on a confession. He toughed it out. He was asked to resign but was handed a fat payoff. Ministers and other officials were not told of MI5’s investigation.

The Americans were unhappy, in some cases furious, with the failure to resolve the issue and pressured the British to do more, especially in the wake of the Albanian failures. As a result, Philby was hauled in for another three-hour questioning. The interview was led by a lawyer turned Security Service officer, H. J. Milmo. Sitting in with him was a quiet young MI5 officer who would become Philby’s chief pursuer. His name was Arthur Martin. ‘He remained silent throughout, watching my movements,’ Philby recalled. Martin was intense and focused, determined to expose the traitor for what he was. He had been recruited into MI5 on Philby’s recommendation but now he burned with anger at the way Philby had got away with it for so long and at the way MI6 protected him.65 Much of the evidence Martin had carefully pieced together was admittedly circumstantial. There had been a spectacular rise in the volume of Soviet radio traffic at just the moment in 1945 that Philby had been informed about a defector offering his services in Turkey. Philby had been assigned to follow up the offer and, sensing the danger to his own position, had played for time until the would-be defector could be spirited back to the Soviet Union on a military aircraft, presumably to his death.

Litzi and the Vienna connection were a weak spot and Martin zeroed in on it to search for proof to support his conviction. Those who had known Litzi were summoned to Room 055 of the War Office to meet a man named Morley, Martin’s cover-name.⁶⁶ He began one interview in October by explaining that the inquiry was about Litzi and asked what the interviewee knew. The interviewee had only known her in London during the war but said she never seemed to want for money and now seemed to be living a surprisingly comfortable life in the Soviet sector of Berlin. Martin focused on Edith Tudor-Hart, who had walked Philby to the park bench to be recruited. The day before the interview in Room 055, a full telephone tap was placed on her in addition to the existing mail check and surveillance. She realised that she was being watched and became increasingly neurotic, waiting for her house to be raided.⁶⁷ She also received a phone call – from whom is unclear – and destroyed a picture she had taken of Philby back in the 1930s.⁶⁸

The investigation into Philby generated a painful fracture within British intelligence. Almost everyone in MI5 – and especially those who had watched him being questioned – was convinced of Philby’s guilt. The two agencies were rivals in the way many sister services can be, expending untold energy in petty bureaucratic squabbles, but there were also deeper distinctions. MI5 were seen as little more than policemen – many were ex-Colonial Special Branch officers – and their well-tailored relatives from MI6 certainly never left them in any doubt that they did not move in the same circles or inhabit quite the same world as MI6 did with its gentlemanly values. Philby’s friends in MI6 thought it impossible that one of their own could have been working for the other side. He had been the victim of a McCarthyist witch-hunt by those fanatics in Washington, they said.

The misplaced loyalty to Philby reflected the culture of the Secret Service and its cherishing of ‘gentlemanly conduct’. Security and vetting had been lax at MI6 for decades. This was because the service recruited incestuously from within small circles in the tight-knit British elite. Fathers recruited sons, officers married secretaries and they all socialised with each other, partly because it alleviated any security concerns and partly because of the sense of superiority it provided. MI6 was a gentlemen’s club and a gentleman could always be trusted. Intelligence, to the old-school types, was a game like cricket where alongside some cunning there were still rules of gentlemanly conduct to be observed (‘It’s such a dirty business that it’s only suitable for gentlemen,’ a spy once said of his work).69 The KGB, whose culture was very different, exploited this weakness by recruiting young idealistic agents who were rebelling against the smug certainties of their parents’ generation. There had been a distrust of intellectuals before the war by the men of action, property and Empire who ran MI6. The service’s number two had boasted that he ‘would never willingly employ a university man’.⁷⁰ But after the war things began to change. Philby, though recruited through the club, had managed to style himself as a man of the future, representing the rise of the professional. In 1950, one new recruit was told that he should ‘model’ himself on Philby, the ‘star of the service’.⁷¹

Philby’s best friend in MI6 was Nicholas Elliott, son of an Eton provost and a classic establishment man: ‘he was everything you would expect an Etonian to be,’ recalled Anthony Cavendish, who knew him well. A thin man who would glance over his round glasses in a donnish manner, he had two joys in life, Ascot and dirty jokes. Elliott’s recollection of a conversation with a security officer on his return to London from the Middle East in 1945 gives a taste of both Elliott himself and of the closed world of MI6 and the establishment:

Security Officer: Sit down, I’d like to have a frank talk with you.

Nicholas Elliott: As you wish, Colonel.

Security Officer: Does your wife know what you do?

Nicholas Elliott: Yes.

Security Officer: How did that come about?

Nicholas Elliott: She was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped.

Security Officer: Quite so. What about your mother?

Nicholas Elliott: She thinks I’m in something called SIS which she believes stands for the Secret Intelligence Service.

Security Officer: Good God! How did she come to know that?

Nicholas Elliott: A member of the War Cabinet told her at a cocktail party.

Security Officer: Who was he?

Nicholas Elliott: I’d prefer not to say.

Security Officer: Then what about your father?

Nicholas Elliott: He thinks I’m a spy.

Security Officer: So why should he think you’re a spy?

Nicholas Elliott: Because the Chief told him in the bar at White’s.72

Elliott, like many of the new generation, looked up to Kim Philby. He became his greatest defender, paving the way for a very personal betrayal. Philby too had been recruited through knowing the right people, culminating in lunch with a senior MI6 officer accompanied by his father St John Philby. ‘When Kim went out to the lavatory, I asked St John about him,’ the officer later recalled. ‘“He was a bit of a communist at Cambridge, wasn’t he?” I enquired. “Oh, that was all schoolboy nonsense,” St John replied. “He’s a reformed character now.’”⁷³ That was enough for the MI6 man, who had known St John from India and who later said, ‘I knew his people.’⁷⁴ St John Philby was an oddity, a member of the imperial establishment who had begun in the Colonial Service in India but ended up converting to Islam and receiving as a second wife a slave girl from King Ibn Saud. All the way through this strange journey, he kept his membership of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall and tried to catch the cricket test match scores. When his young son Harold talked to the locals in India, the father said of him, ‘He’s a real little Kim,’ after the Rudyard Kipling spy-boy who could blend in with the locals. The nickname had gone with him through Westminster School and Cambridge and then to the service. On one hand, there could hardly have been a less apt nickname for a man who so utterly rejected the flag-waving, imperial patriotism that Kipling had espoused and that had lured many others, like Daphne Park, to join the Secret Service. On the other hand, Kipling’s Kim was a boy who could pretend to be someone else (Indian rather than English) and above all, ‘what he loved was the game for its own sake – the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies’. Philby too loved the game of espionage but was also trapped by it.

For all his success, Philby had not always been trusted by his KGB mentors. They had refused to believe him when he said that MI6 had no agents in Russia, and the fact that MI6 appeared so incompetent in failing to spot his Communist past added to suspicions that he might be a double agent whose allegiance remained with Britain and who was being used against them. At one point contact with him was terminated and a rather inept surveillance team sent out to see if Philby and those he recruited (with the possible exception of Maclean) really were loyal to British intelligence.75 Although he hid them carefully in his untrustworthy memoir, Philby himself had doubts, particularly when he was abandoned and at the start of the war when the Soviet Union signed a short-lived pact with the Nazis. But, once embarked on, the path of treachery is almost impossible to leave. Philby remained steadfast. Some say it was deceit itself and the thrill of the double life which drove him rather than a faith in Communism. In later life he denied that his commitment was anything other than ideological. He had chosen his side and then stuck with it, he said, quoting a line from his friend Graham Greene’s book, The Confidential Agent, in which the agent defends himself for backing the poor even when their leaders commit atrocities like those of the other side. ‘You’ve got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all … It’s no worse – is it? – than my country, right or wrong. You choose your side once and for all – of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.’⁷⁶ Philby particularly hated being called a ‘double agent’ in the popular sense of the term implying someone who had changed sides. He always saw himself as a ‘Soviet intelligence officer’ for whom the struggle against fascism extended into a struggle against imperialism. ‘All through my career, I have been a straight penetration agent working in the Soviet interest.’77 The burden of betrayal, however, did not perhaps sit as lightly on Philby as he, and his critics, would make out.

He was so successful as a penetration agent that some thought Kim was destined to become chief of MI6. That was partly because the competition was not up to much. ‘Sometimes, in the early weeks, I felt that perhaps I had not made the grade after all,’ Philby says of his early days in the Second World War. ‘It seemed that somewhere, lurking in deep shadow, there must be another service, really secret and really powerful.’ Fellow wartime MI6 officer Hugh Trevor-Roper thought Philby a candidate for the top. ‘Who else of his generation was there? … I looked around the world I had left, at the part-time stockbrokers and retired Indian policemen, the agreeable epicureans from the bars of White’s and Boodle’s, the jolly, conventional ex-naval officers and the robust adventurers from the bucket-shop; and then I looked at Philby.’⁷⁸ McCargar says Angleton told him that Kim might yet become chief even after the first allegations had surfaced.⁷⁹ Philby himself was more realistic, understanding that the number-two spot was more likely thanks to his complicated personal life, which featured women and too much drink even for the 1950s.

But then in 1951 he found himself out of a job and without a purpose. He floated around the City and journalism for a few years. Then a Russian defector in Australia revealed that Burgess and Maclean had been long-term penetration agents who had been tipped off by a ‘third man’. The pressure was back on. The Americans, especially FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been a guest at Philby’s house, were convinced of his guilt and angry about their British cousins’ perceived protection of him. Along with some MI5 officers, they made sure that friends in the newspapers got hold of his name. Ironically, MI6 officers would be furious with the Americans for the leaking of Philby’s name, seeing it as the unacceptable smearing of one of their own. Philby was on a train, undertaking the long process of getting rid of any surveillance in preparation for meeting his Soviet contact, when he saw a copy of the Evening Standard newspaper. In October 1955 an MP had asked the Prime Minister Anthony Eden ‘how long he was going to go on shielding the “dubious Third Man activities of Mr Philby’”.⁸⁰ By a strange quirk of fate, the title of Graham Greene’s screenplay was now applied to the man who, unbeknown to anyone, may have helped inspire it.

The establishment rallied round. Philby had survived another bout of questioning by his former colleagues at MI6, one which his pursuers at MI5 thought absurdly polite and non-confrontational as if MI6 were trying to help him clear his name. ‘To call it an interrogation would be a travesty,’ said an MI5 officer.81 The Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, stood up in the House of Commons in November and said there was no evidence that Philby had betrayed the interests of his country. Philby hosted a bravura press conference in his mother’s flat in London. For five minutes flash bulbs illuminated the scene almost continuously before the questioning began.

‘Were you in fact the Third Man?’

‘No, I was not.’

‘Do you think there was one?’

‘No comment.’

Each question was met with a brief, clipped answer.

‘Mr Macmillan said you had had Communist associations. Is that why you were asked to resign?’

‘I was asked to resign from the Foreign Office because of an imprudent association with Burgess and as a result of his disappearance.’

‘Can you say when your Communist associations ended? I assume they did.’

‘The last time I spoke to a Communist knowing he was a Communist was some time in 1934.’

There was no sign of a stammer. The only suggestion of something amiss were a few hairs which had not quite been Brylcreemed into position.

‘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. On the subject of friendship I’d prefer to say as little as possible because it’s very complicated.’⁸²

He then served the assembled hacks beer and sherry. The following day his friends from MI6 called to congratulate him. The next summer Philby, now effectively in the clear, received a phone call from Nicholas Elliott.

‘Something unpleasant again?’ Philby said

‘Maybe just the opposite,’ Elliott replied.

Philby’s old chums, George Kennedy Young and Nicholas Elliott, had got him a job in Beirut. Officially he was a journalist for the Economist and the Observer.83 But he was also a salaried agent of the service (an agent who would be handled by an officer rather than an officer in his own right who could recruit agents). The Americans were never told he had been put back on the payroll and were unhappy when they later found out. Philby arrived in the Lebanon in August 1956. He would find a new life as a spy in a city which lay at the centre of much of the plotting and scheming of a turbulent Middle East. But, even without being aware of their grievous error in sending him there, Philby’s two friends in MI6 were going through dark times.

The mid-1950s came to be known as ‘the horrors’ by the MI6 officers who lived through those years. The wildmen known within the service as the Robber Barons championed aggressive covert operations but were coming unstuck in a spectacular and occasionally grisly way. The emerging myth of James Bond met its counterpoint in the sad tale of Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb. In April 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a high-profile trip to Britain on board the state-of-the-art cruiser the Ordzhonikidze. This was an important visit for Anthony Eden who wanted to play the statesman in the new, friendlier, post-Stalin era. The MI6 London station – run by Nicholas Elliott with Andrew King as his deputy – decided that the visit was too good an opportunity to miss and ten days beforehand put up a list of six operations to MI6’s Foreign Office adviser. The Admiralty had been particularly keen to understand the underwater-noise characteristics of the Soviet vessels.⁸⁴ The placing of a Foreign Office adviser inside MI6 was part of a drive to put the service on a somewhat tighter leash, but when an MI6 officer ambled into his office for a ten-minute chat about the plans, the adviser came away thinking they would then be cleared at a higher level (as some sensitive operations were) while Elliott and his colleagues assumed that the quick conversation constituted clearance. The problem was that the Prime Minister had explicitly ordered that no risky operations were to be carried out and had already vetoed a number of plans (including bugging Claridge’s Hotel where the Soviets were staying and another operation involving a catamaran).⁸⁵

The operation bore all the hallmarks of the over-confident amateurishness of the period. Crabb was an ageing frogman who had an impressive, but increasingly distant, war record foiling attacks on Allied shipping with daring dives. He was now, like others, well past his prime and living on the legends of the past. His private life was a mess with a failed marriage, gambling, drink and depression. Diving and secret work were his escape and he begged to be allowed to undertake one more mission.86 Crabb and a young MI6 officer checked into a local hotel under their real names and Crabb slugged back five double whiskies the night before the dive.⁸⁷ Where Bond battled the bad guys in the crystal-clear Caribbean, the diminutive Crabb plunged into the cold, muddy tide of Portsmouth Harbour just before seven in the morning. He had about ninety minutes of air and by 9.15 it was clear something had gone wrong. For a while, it looked like the whole affair might be hushed up. The MI6 officer went back to the hotel to rip out the registration page. The hotel owner went to the press, who sniffed a good story.⁸⁸ The disappearance of a well-known hero could not be covered up.

The Prime Minister, who for weeks was not even told of Crabb’s disappearance, was furious when the story broke, taking MI6’s recklessness and amateurishness as a personal affront.⁸⁹ He was so angry that he broke with the normal ‘neither confirm nor deny’ rule over intelligence operations and told the Commons, ‘I think it is necessary, in the special circumstances of this case, to make it clear that what was done was done without the authority or knowledge of Her Majesty’s Ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.’⁹⁰ Elliott, to cover his own failings, blamed the politicians. ‘A storm in a teacup was blown up by ineptitude into a major diplomatic incident … he [Eden] flew into a tantrum because he had not been consulted and a series of misleading statements were put out which simply had the effect of stimulating public speculation.’ Others thought Elliott was responsible for a veritable ‘one man Bay of Pigs’.⁹¹ A few wondered whether there had been a leak about the operation and if so from where. Just over a year later, a fisherman saw a black object floating thirty yards away in the water which looked like a tractor tyre. When he pulled it out with a hook he realised it was a headless, decaying corpse in a black frogman’s suit.⁹² Crabb’s ex-wife could not even identify what was left, fuelling wild speculation that Crabb had defected or been abducted and taken to the Soviet Union. Decades later, a Soviet frogman would claim that a tip-off from a British spy meant that he had been lying in wait. Fearing that Crabb was planting a mine to blow up the ship, the frogman says he swam up from below to slash Crabb’s air tubes and then his throat with a knife. The body was so small he at first thought it belonged to a boy. But he then found himself staring into the dying eyes of a middle-aged man. According to his unconfirmed account, he pushed the body away into the undercurrents, leaving a trail of blood.93 The reflection in the mirror held up before MI6 by the Crabb incident was not lean Bond but a drink-addled frogman doing something stupid on a semi-freelance basis. It was not pretty.

The scandal was the last straw for the hapless Chief of the Service, John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair. His weakness had led the Robber Barons to bypass him and all effective oversight: ‘Where I felt if [a proposed operation] went any further somebody would say no – and I was quite certain of my judgement to carry out the operation – [you] simply tell them afterwards,’ George Kennedy Young later said.⁹⁴ In a sign of just how far patience had worn thin with the cowboys, the service suffered the ignominy of having the head of MI5 sent to straighten things out. The new C, Dick White, walked down the dusty, decaying corridors of MI6 headquarters in Broadway and found a place haunted by the ghosts of the past. ‘We’re still cloak and dagger. Fisticuffs. Too many swashbuckling green thumbs thinking we’re about to fight another Second World War,’ one of his senior officers told him.⁹⁵ With the penchant for risk-tasking came an arrogance – a belief that they were the true guardians of the nation and its values – epitomised in a statement attributed to Young. In a world of increasing lawlessness, cruelty and corruption, he said, ‘it is the spy who has been called upon to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests … these days the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.’⁹⁶

The pendulum had swung too far towards risky, gung-ho operations and White began a purge to instil more professionalism. To protect his flank he later promoted Young to be his deputy, a move he would regret. Young, as head of the Middle East desk, had been involved in plotting the 1953 coup in Iran to remove the nationalist, but democratically elected, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, in concert with the CIA, a task which seemed to confirm that aggressive, covert political action could be a powerful tool. Mossadegh had thumbed his nose at the British by trying to reclaim control of his country’s oil and the British had managed to persuade the Americans to help get rid of him. In the long term, like almost every action of its type, the coup proved to be a disaster as the Shah of Iran subsequently veered towards authoritarianism and the Iranian people blamed, and continue to blame, the British and Americans for their plight, both powers gaining a reputation for conspiring and manipulating in the Middle East (a reputation which British intelligence continues to have in many countries, in part thanks to Britain’s colonial history of such entanglements). But at the time the taste for covert action had become intoxicating, a tempting panacea to mask the bitter reality that both political and economic power were rapidly ebbing away from Britain.97 The spies hoped that with their tricks and coups they could magically preserve Britain’s status through a kind of clandestine sleight of hand.

Twelve days after White took over MI6, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and so began a farcical campaign which would lead to the shattering of the illusions of power. Prime Minister Eden took it personally. Beyond the threat to oil supplies and the concern that Nasser was taking arms from a Soviet Union challenging Britain in its old playground, the idea that some jumped-up Arab could thumb his nose at Great Britain was too much for him. Eden was all handsome, polished charm on the surface. But beneath that he was highly strung and physically and mentally under strain with gout and nerves plaguing him, feeding on delusions of British grandeur. At Downing Street on the night of the nationalisation he ranted and raged. A kind of fever took hold of him in the coming days as he became obsessed with destroying Nasser. And he was unusually explicit about what that meant. There were no euphemisms or talk of ridding him of turbulent priests. One of his ministers recalled Eden calling him up on an unsecure line and saying, ‘I want Nasser murdered, don’t you understand?’⁹⁸ This was the licence to kill.

George Kennedy Young was left in little doubt about what he was being asked to do, nor did he harbour any moral doubts about such a course of action. ‘It’s not a Sunday-school picnic,’ he later commented. ‘Acts of government are not choices between good and bad. They are between two evils – the lesser of two evils. Someone is always going to get hurt by a decision of government … absolute morality, absolute ethics just does not exist in affairs of the state.’99 Before and after the war, Young drew up plans to kill Nasser, ranging from using dissident military officers to kitting out an electric razor with explosives, to using poison gas and sending out hit teams, all very redolent of the CIA’s attempts to ‘take out’ Castro a few years later, which were equally hapless. Others in the service were reluctant to engage in that kind of behaviour, concerned that they would create a martyr.¹⁰⁰ (The only other serious request for assassination was for the service to kill President Sukarno of Indonesia, a request that was ignored owing to fears of what would come next.)¹⁰¹ Nasser learnt of the plans and the KGB provided him with increased security, including a caged bird to warn of poison gas.¹⁰²

But the debate about assassination was a sideshow to the real action. Young would later reflect that the problem with the whole Suez plan, in which he had the lead role within the service, was that it was a last play at Empire, at pretending that Britain did not have to live in the shadow of the Americans. The conspirators concocted a secret plan in which the Israelis would first invade part of Egypt and then the British and French would intervene as ‘peacekeepers’, leaving the Canal in their hands. ‘It was the last self-conscious fling of the old British Style. Its failure may even have been mainly due to this style having become over self-conscious: the play and not the reality was the thing,’ Young later wrote. ‘As the old wartime basements in Whitehall were opened up for the task-force planners, they all flocked in … rather too puffy of face and corpulent of body to play wistful roles. They were nevertheless delighted to see each other again, swap old memories, and once more sport their DSOs, MCs and Croix de Guerre.’¹⁰³

The decrepitude of the old-school British intelligence establishment was all too clear to the CIA’s representative on the Joint Intelligence Committee staff. The new boy from out of town, Chester Cooper, arrived in London just before Suez. At his first meeting, he found everyone to be very tall and wearing identical black suits (Savile Row), identical blue striped ties (Eton) and identical spectacles (National Health). As well as the latest intelligence documents, they also proceeded to hand round some Greek verse. At one point someone stuck his head through the door to announce the latest cricket score. There were groans. Cooper was then proudly shown a Latin translation of the Greek verse which had occupied someone’s attention rather than the more formal documents at hand.104

In a situation more than a little reminiscent of another Middle Eastern war nearly half a century later, when British intelligence chiefs were asked what would happen after Nasser had been removed and who would run Egypt, ‘there was a collective shrug’. They displayed little understanding of the force of Arab nationalism.¹⁰⁵ The experts failed over Suez to see what was going on in the Arab street and to understand the resentment the presence of foreign troops created.¹⁰⁶ MI6’s intelligence on Egypt had also been fatally compromised. An entire network run under journalistic cover was penetrated by the Egyptians and in August was broken up, with thirty agents arrested and two British officials expelled.¹⁰⁷ This was a crippling blow whose impact would spur the desire for a new approach within the service. What the intelligence said did not matter much anyway, since the few warnings that were given were ignored.¹⁰⁸ The whole plot had been undertaken by a tiny cabal, including parts of MI6, around the Prime Minister with even some members of the JIC out of the loop (one transferred his life savings into American investments in fear of Britain’s economic future when he found out).¹⁰⁹ The noises from the Soviet Union were sufficiently threatening for Daphne Park, by now stationed in Moscow, to be sent out of the Embassy with the Defence Attaché to look for any signs that the Soviets might respond with force.¹¹⁰

The disaster of Suez was blamed by Young, in true blustering style, on timidity in Whitehall and that old canard of failing to follow through on a good plan. ‘There is a total collapse of will here,’ he says he told his contact in Israel’s Mossad during the operation.¹¹¹ The failure roused American fury (although the US may also have sensed an opportunity to quash British pretensions of power in the Middle East). The real fury came not just because of London, Paris and Tel Aviv planning their operation in secret and then executing it ineffectively but because of what was happening in Eastern Europe at exactly the same moment.

As the crisis reached its apogee, Cooper of the CIA was woken by a phone call before dawn on Saturday 3 November. He drove to his Embassy in Grosvenor Square, on the way waving to the prostitutes with whom he was now familiar from these trips. There he took a call from CIA Deputy Director Robert Amory. ‘Tell your friends’, an exasperated Amory shouted so loudly that Cooper thought he could have heard him across the Atlantic without a telephone, ‘to comply with the god-damn cease-fire or go ahead with the god-damn invasion. Either way, we’ll back ’em up if they do it fast. What we can’t stand is their goddamn hesitation waltz while Hungary is burning.’112

From his prison cell in Budapest, Paul Gorka, the youthful resistance agent from Béla Bajomi’s rolled-up network, had sensed a change of mood through October 1956.¹¹³ One day came the sound of gunfire in the distance, the next that of heavy weapons and artillery followed by helicopters. The guards claimed it was ‘just an exercise’. Then a captured tank smashed through the prison main gate. The freedom fighters on board released the prisoners, who stepped out to find bloodstained sandbags, smashed tanks and corpses littering the streets and a fully fledged anti-Communist uprising under way. Surely, with the promised resistance at last showing its strength, the West would come to its aid?

The first Western journalist to make it into the city during those violently hopeful days was Anthony Cavendish. On his way back from a late-night party in Vienna a few years earlier, his motorbike had skidded into a cyclist. This had been one run-in too many with Andrew King, then head of the MI6 station. Cavendish had been pushed out of MI6 and joined the UPI press agency. As he arrived in Budapest the Soviets were still in retreat from the outskirts of the city. ‘On the back of one tank lay the corpse of a Soviet soldier, his eyes staring vacantly at the Hungarian capital … A Hungarian peasant spat at one tank as it passed him an arm’s length away,’ he wrote.¹¹⁴

In the city, people asked Cavendish what the British and Americans were doing and when their help would arrive. There had been no advance warning of the uprising – another failure for British and American intelligence gathering. The CIA had only one officer in Hungary, who spent almost all of his time keeping his cover up and was under orders not to take an active role.¹¹⁵ For a few, tense days Budapest was liberated. The Russians, for the first time, had been rolled back. And it had been done not by the CIA or by MI6 but by the Hungarian people. Then in the early hours of Sunday 4 November, Paul Gorka and his fellow fighters heard the voice of Imre Nagy, the leader of the uprising, say on the radio that Soviet tanks were on their way. As refugees headed over the border, the CIA station chief in Vienna received a stream of agent reports indicating Soviet preparations to crush the uprising. He knew there would be no cowboys riding to the rescue as the Soviet juggernaut primed itself.116 In London, officials noted uneasily that they could not protest about Russians attacking Budapest when they had just attacked Egypt.¹¹⁷

Frank Wisner arrived in Vienna and watched as the final messages came over from the Hungarian partisans. ‘We are under heavy machine gun fire … Goodbye friends. God save our souls.’¹¹⁸ Wisner felt utter impotence as the full might of the Red Army descended on Budapest. He drank heavily that night. On Vienna’s pavements people listened to the bleak news on outdoor speakers installed on lampposts.¹¹⁹ ‘It was desperate youngsters who sprung up as fast as others were cut down: it was flaming bottles of gasoline against armour and big guns,’ wrote Cavendish in his despatch as the guns opened up on the city.¹²⁰

As he listened to the news of the Soviet tanks entering the city, James McCargar was in a Viennese hotel room. ‘My anger was vented on the British and French, whose adventure at Suez I wildly blamed for giving the Russians the pretext for the action in Hungary,’ recalled McCargar. All the ‘political warfare’ and propaganda had led the Hungarians to believe they would not stand alone. They were wrong. There were no plans. There was no help. The Soviets had shown they were willing to use overwhelming force to maintain control of their European satellites and that the attempts to prise them away – whether through covert action or through supporting resistance groups – were likely to lead to nothing.¹²¹ Roll-back was dead.

In London, George Kennedy Young was also angry at a betrayal by an ally. ‘Although for ten years the United States government had always hoped for, even where it had not tried to propagate, a spirit of active resistance to Communism behind the Iron Curtain, when the moment came it was not prepared to lift a finger,’ he wrote a few years later, perhaps overlooking the fact that lifting a finger over Hungary might have meant Armageddon. He also railed against America’s lack of support over Suez. ‘When its own Allies acted in pursuance of what they believed to be their national interests, the United States government took the lead in preventing them.’122

Britain had continued to live and labour under the illusion that it was still a great power. Suez exposed the truth. After the initial flare of miserable anti-Americanism had subsided, some would look to a close relationship with Washington to exercise influence and power, wherever that took them; others looked to Europe. But no longer could it be done alone. The relationship with the US would never be quite the same again. It was clear who was in charge. Eden emerged broken, his eyes staring vacantly, his hands twitching and his face grey. In a piece of sublime irony, he set off for Jamaica to recuperate at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s simple, shuttered, cliff-top home where the former Naval Intelligence man was writing the James Bond books, his own antidote to the reality of post-imperial decline. Eden and Fleming may not have been amused if they had known that the Egyptian intelligence service bought up copies of the Bond books for their training courses.¹²³

The deaths in Budapest put paid to the idea that, with Stalin gone, the Soviet Union had fundamentally changed. It helped undermine much of the international appeal of Soviet Communism and there was disillusion from within as well, including for KGB officer Anatoly Golitsyn. The Hungarian uprising was, he claimed, the moment when he understood that the system could not be reformed.¹²⁴ Philby in Beirut watched the events faraway in Hungary and closer by in Egypt with a detached air. At the time he was going through one of his phases of feeling rather lost. His betrayals had left him in a strange halfway place between his two lives. His trail of personal devastation continued to grow. His second wife Aileen, who was back in Britain, had been self-harming for some time as her marriage disintegrated and perhaps also as she suspected her husband’s dark secret. In Beirut, he received a telegram informing him of her death, news which caused him no distress. By then he had moved on. Just six weeks before Suez, he had been in the crowded bar of the St George’s Hotel when he met Eleanor Brewer, the wife of the New York Times correspondent. He began to escort her around the souks and cafés and she left her husband. Before long Philby went to tell her ex-husband that he planned to marry Eleanor. ‘That sounds like the best possible solution,’ Brewer said. ‘What do you make of the situation in Iraq?’ he added, returning to the political issue of the day.125 By 1959, Philby and Eleanor were living in a fifth-floor apartment full of her sculptures and his trinkets collected on travels around the region. For most who betray, falling in love is a risk, a vulnerability. But, after Litzi, Philby always managed to separate out his lives and Eleanor saw only the smile, never suspecting what it masked.

After Budapest, Anthony Cavendish went on to Beirut in the late 1950s with UPI, working from the top floor of a seafront hotel. There he filed despatches on bloody gun battles, lounging by the pool with a telephone cable stretched out to the side and a tray carrying beer next to him.¹²⁶ Every now and again he would have a ‘drink or ten’ with Philby for old times’ sake at one of the hotel bars. Drinks would stretch on into the afternoon with Philby showing no ill effects. He never lost control or gave himself away no matter how much he consumed. Despite the accusations against him, Cavendish thought it was right to give his old colleague the benefit of the doubt. ‘I thought he was a charming and excellent man and never had the least thought of him turning out to be what he turned out to be,’ he recalled. ‘I suppose I thought he must be very clever and we were very stupid.’¹²⁷

At a Beirut restaurant in 1960, things began to look up for Philby. Nicholas Elliott had arrived as the new MI6 station chief and their friendship resumed and with it Philby’s usefulness to the Soviets.¹²⁸ He also kept close to the CIA officers. ‘Philby was friendly with all the Yanks in Beirut. A lot of them blabbed. He was pretty good at getting them to talk,’ said George Kennedy Young, focusing on others’ failings rather than his service’s own.¹²⁹ Philby was still part of the old gang and the source of much interest. When Ian Fleming passed through town later that year, he too dined with his old chum Elliott, and the conversation inevitably turned to Philby.¹³⁰

Philby’s father St John had settled in a simple stone house outside Beirut near the mountains, allowing the father and son’s strange relationship to resume. Philby looked up to him but never seemed too close and would sometimes blame his stutter on his father for unspecified reasons. The father had, though, impressed on his son the need to have the guts to go through with what one believed whatever others thought, a lesson the son certainly learnt.¹³¹ Philby senior gave a speech at the American Women’s Club in the city and told the audience the Americans had ruined Arabia. ‘And who brought the Americans to Arabia?’ he asked. He paused and then, full of contradictions to the end, said ‘I did.’132

Elliott had lunch with both Philbys one day. St John was agreeable company. ‘He left at tea time, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of Embassy staff in a nightclub, had a heart attack and died early next morning. His last words were, “Take me away, I’m bored here.’”¹³³ Philby junior went out of circulation for days afterwards. As 1962 progressed, Eleanor began to sense a change. The drinking was getting heavier with an edge of desperation, a desire to escape. When a pet fox he kept on his balcony was found dead, Philby plunged into a strange depression. On New Year’s Eve he smashed his head against a radiator in a bathroom, leaving himself splattered with blood. A doctor said any more booze might have killed him that night. The denouement approached.

Elliott returned to Beirut for a very different kind of visit in January 1963. He had finished his time as head of station just three months earlier and been replaced by Peter Lunn, formerly of Vienna. Elliott was there to see Philby once more but no longer as his protector. Anatoly Golitsyn had defected from the KGB and had brought with him talk of a ‘ring of five’. Arthur Martin had pulled together enough to convince Dick White, who already believed Philby was guilty, that the saga had gone on long enough. Arthur Martin was originally the man who was to be sent out but at the last minute Elliott took his place. The belief was that an old friend would be more likely to secure the deal that White had in mind. Remarkably, White felt he had to lie to Elliott to convince him of his friend’s guilt by saying a KGB source had confirmed the exact identity of the traitor, which was not strictly true.¹³⁴

Lunn telephoned Philby and asked him over to a flat which had been wired up for the occasion. Philby arrived at four in the afternoon still bandaged from his drunken fall. He walked in to find his old friend. Elliott got up from a chair.

‘I rather thought it would be you,’ said Philby. The meaning of these words would be the source of much pain for the British Secret Service.

‘I’ll get right to the point. Unfortunately it’s not very pleasant,’ said Elliott. ‘I came to tell you that your past has caught up with you.’ Philby laughed. ‘Have you all gone mad once again?’ he said. ‘You want to start all that? After all these years? You’ve lost your sense of humour! You’ll be a laughing-stock!’

‘No, we haven’t lost anything,’ Elliott responded. ‘On the contrary. We’ve found additional information about you. And it puts everything in place.’

‘What information? And what is there to put in place?’

Elliott stood up, paced the room, went to the window and looked out. Without turning, he said: ‘Listen, Kim, you know I was on your side all the time from the moment there were suspicions about you. But now there is new information. They’ve shown it to me. And now even I am convinced, absolutely convinced that you worked for the Soviet intelligence services. You worked for them right up until ’49.’135

Philby did not know what the new information was but would have suspected it was a defector. He knew they had something. But not everything. Why 1949? he might have wondered. So would others later, and some of those would suspect that this was a convenient way for his old friends to signal to Philby that he needed to confess only to crimes committed before he went to Washington that year, in order to keep him out of the clutches of the FBI. Of the Cambridge Five, Philby was the most hard headed, the one who never cracked under pressure, who found deception came easy to the end. It was not over yet.

‘You stopped working for them in 1949, I’m absolutely certain of that,’ Elliott explained. ‘I can understand people who worked for the Soviet Union, say before or during the war. But by 1949, a man of your intellect and spirit had to see that all the rumours about Stalin’s monstrous behaviour were not rumours, they were the truth … you decided to break with the USSR … Therefore I can give you my word, and that of Dick White, that you will get full immunity, you will be pardoned, but only if you tell it yourself. We need your collaboration, your help.’¹³⁶ As Philby prepared to walk out, Elliott added, ‘I’m offering you a lifeline, Kim.’ There was another line which Elliott later recalled saying but which Philby never recounted when he talked of the meeting, perhaps because it cut a little too close to the bone: ‘I once looked up to you, Kim. My God, how I despise you now. I hope you have enough decency left to understand why.’ Elliott told him they would meet again the following day. The whole encounter lasted about five minutes. Once he had left, Elliott told Lunn, ‘Kim’s broken. Everything’s OK.’

Philby went back the next day and began to talk. He talked for two hours, saying he had worked for the Soviets until 1946 and had only tipped off Maclean as a friend in 1951. Elliott believed Philby had cracked. But he was still playing the game. Philby went back home and had a whole bottle of whisky. Elliott left for the Congo. Lunn, it was agreed, would take over and finish off the debrief.

In London, the initial ‘confession’ led to confidence that it would all be wrapped up soon. Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, wrote to Hoover at the FBI to say there was no evidence that Philby had worked for the Russians after 1946. ‘If this is so, it follows that damage to the United States will have been confined to the period of the Second World War,’ he explained, with more than a hint of pleading.137 But after his meeting with Elliott, Philby had gone to his balcony to signal to his Soviet contact in Beirut – he held a book rather than a newspaper to indicate that it was urgent.¹³⁸ ‘I think your time has come,’ his contact told him. ‘There’s room for you in Moscow.’

On Wednesday, 23 January 1963, Kim and Eleanor Philby were due to go round to friends from the British Embassy for dinner. A violent storm had swept into Beirut and late in the afternoon Philby took his raincoat and told his wife he had a meeting and would be back at six in time for the party. An hour later, one of his boys told Eleanor that Philby had called to say he would meet her at the party. So she went alone, apologising for her husband’s lateness and promising he would be there soon. The hours passed, and eventually everyone agreed to eat without him. Eleanor headed home through the storm, waves breaking against the corniche. At midnight, she called Peter Lunn. He was not there. Philby had been due to meet him and, when he failed to turn up, Lunn had gone straight to the Embassy, panic mingling with despair. Eleanor passed a message to Lunn’s wife and ten minutes later Lunn called. ‘Would you like me to come round?’

‘I would be most grateful,’ she said.¹³⁹

She asked whether they should check the hospitals, fearing a car accident. She also suggested that perhaps he had gone off on a ‘lost weekend’ as he sometimes was wont to do. Lunn already feared a far worse truth and asked if anything was missing. Frantic search parties were sent out. It did not take long for him to realise that it was too late. As the sun rose over the mountains Eleanor knew he had gone. It was their wedding anniversary.

Elliott was about to cross the Congo River when he got the message and rushed back. Philby had the last laugh on the bungling Elliott in Beirut, the last laugh on the British ruling class and its old-fashioned notions of friendship and how ‘gentlemen’ behaved. He had left Beirut on a freighter and eventually arrived before dawn at a small Soviet frontier post. There were a few tables and chairs and a charcoal stove. Soldiers were brewing tea on the stove and the air was thick with cigarette smoke, he later recalled.140 One man was waiting for him and in English said, ‘Kim, your mission is concluded.’

Despite never having known or suspected he was a spy, Eleanor followed him in September to Moscow. ‘He betrayed many people, me among them. But men are not always masters of their fate,’ she wrote a few years later when it had all fallen apart and she had returned home. ‘Kim had the guts, or the weakness, to stand by a decision made thirty years ago, whatever the cost to those who loved him most, and to whom he was deeply attached.’¹⁴¹ It was a view echoed by the man himself. ‘I have always operated at two levels, a personal level and a political one,’ he later reflected.¹⁴² ‘When the two have come in conflict I have had to put politics first. This conflict can be very painful. I don’t like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it. But then decent soldiers feel badly about the necessity of killing in wartime.’

‘What a shame we reopened it all. Just trouble,’ White told Elliott.¹⁴³ Some MI6 officers – and Philby himself – wondered if he had been allowed to flee to avoid the embarrassment of a trial at a time when the government was already reeling from a torrent of spy scandals, including in the Admiralty and MI6 itself.¹⁴⁴ A few came to believe that Philby had been tipped off by a mole within MI5. Most believe that, lacking evidence that could be presented in court, MI6 was hoping an old friend could be used to draw him home and find a quiet way of dealing with this through the exchange of immunity for information. That way no one would be embarrassed. Even when Philby had fled to Moscow, his old colleagues believed he must surely be a double agent ‘run by a most secret section’ within MI6. Or had he been bundled at gunpoint on to the ship? And everyone was asking: if Philby, then who else?145 Arthur Martin at MI5 was furious. He had been supposed to go to Beirut to confront Philby using the evidence he had painstakingly built up. But ‘they’ had chosen one of their own instead, foolishly hoping to play on any vestiges of friendship that Elliott’s presence could muster. Even the tapes were flawed because Lunn and Elliott had left the windows open, allowing traffic noises to drown out some of Philby’s precious words. Typical MI6 amateurishness, Martin fumed, as he screwed up his eyes and pounded his knees with frustration, listening to what was left. ‘It was no contest,’ a colleague of Martin said when he listened to Elliott take on Philby. ‘By the end they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public-school accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century.’¹⁴⁶

The heyday for the ‘wildmen’ and the old timers was coming to an end. The old Russia hands were moved on through the 1950s. Harry Carr was sidelined after the Baltic disasters had been exposed and he left MI6 in 1961. At the end of his days, listening to Russian folk songs, he would blame Philby for everything. George Kennedy Young headed for the City the same year that Carr left and continued a long drift first to the right and then beyond to the political fringes, railing against the way in which non-white immigration was endangering Britain while the failure to check left-wing subversion was destroying it from within. When there were whispers in the 1970s of individuals with close connections to MI6 plotting a coup to overthrow the British government, it was Young whom they were talking about. In Washington, Frank Wisner went mad, literally. He was given electroshock therapy for six months in 1958 before being ‘cured’ and sent as station chief to London. Four years later he relapsed, and in 1965 he put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.¹⁴⁷ Philby’s friend and drinking buddy in Washington, James Jesus Angleton, also went mad, but in a different way. He saw himself as Machiavelli. Yet he had been fooled. His colleagues were sure he must have woken in the night remembering yet another secret he had shared with Philby over a Martini. The result in Angleton’s mind was a paranoia about the Soviets and their deviousness, which when allied to the ideas of the KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn would take the CIA and MI6 into a dark place.

Suez had revealed to Britain what it had become – a once great power in decline increasingly incapable of changing the world on its own terms – but Philby had compounded the problem by sowing distrust between Britain and the now dominant United States. When his successor took over as liaison to Washington he found the relationship virtually paralysed.148 The same officer thought the impact on relations with Whitehall and the Foreign Office was even worse, ‘cataclysmic’ he thought, with a general perception of incompetence hanging over the service.¹⁴⁹ Philby’s betrayal revealed that, for all the myths spun around MI6 by its own members as well as in the fictional world of Bond, its clubby amateurishness had been outwitted by its enemy. Philby tore the service’s guts out and then held up the messy entrails he had exposed. A classified damage assessment of the Philby affair was carried out by an MI6 officer. Some officers when interviewed continued to resist the truth and lashed out at the Americans. The full extent of the carnage he wreaked, the agents blown, the operations compromised was truly shocking, according to those who read the report.¹⁵⁰ But it was his introduction of the cancer of betrayal and suspicion into an organisation and its relationships which was hardest to assess but perhaps most lasting in its effect.

The depth of the pain was largely hidden from public view. It would be years before the public at large began to understand that the ‘mid-ranking civil servant’ who was described as having defected was something far more. Some like Sir Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6 on whose watch Philby had been recruited, knew all too well what had happened and felt haunted. When his son-in-law briefly moved in to stay with Menzies, the thin walls revealed that Menzies was ‘suffering from the most appalling nightmares. There was one recurrent theme in these nightmares, which were awful to hear. That was there was a Russian defector who was taken up in a helicopter over the English Channel and given the choice – talk about Philby or be chucked out without a parachute. They chucked him out.’¹⁵¹ Philby knocked the self-confidence of MI6. Even in the mid-1970s, new recruits remember wondering why certain operations and capabilities were not employed against the Soviets and they slowly realised that it was the legacy of Philby’s betrayal and the fear of its being repeated.

As the 1960s got under way, old social conventions were breaking down and the establishment was increasingly being satirised in popular culture. This made Philby an anti-hero to some for exposing its failings. When George Blake was uncovered as a spy in 1961 there was anguish in the service over the secrets lost, but not the sense of personal betrayal associated with Philby. Blake was not one of ‘us’. He was virtually a foreigner. ‘But Philby, an aggressive, upper-class enemy, was of our blood and hunted with our pack,’ wrote John le Carré.152 Philby became the benchmark for treachery and his story would inspire le Carré to write his own study of betrayal, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Philby would be transformed into Bill Haydon, motivated initially to betray even his closest friend by anti-Americanism and a belief that ‘the political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs’, the latter being a sentiment with which his pursuer Smiley half agreed. Haydon too became caught up in the game, unwilling or unable to leave.¹⁵³ Where Bond was depoliticised fantasy, le Carré rooted his vision in the mundane, sometimes brutal, realities he had observed from the inside.

Many individuals exert a fascination over the public, but rarely has one individual held such a fascination for so many years for a country that they betrayed. The obsession with Philby is a very British brand of masochism. If a country gets the spies it deserves, then perhaps its spies also get the traitors they deserve. Philby himself always denied being a traitor to anything. ‘To betray, you must first belong,’ he told a British journalist who confronted him in Moscow. ‘I never belonged.’¹⁵⁴

In the spy’s world, patriotism allied to loyalty is the only insurance against treachery. It is a world in which deceit is part of everyday life, whether in protecting one’s own cover or in encouraging someone else to betray their country. For a service which encourages betrayal by others, patriotism to country and loyalty to friends is the only guarantee against those skills being turned inwards. While spies trade in treachery, they find it utterly unconscionable among their own. Like the police who need to guard against an understanding of crime turning into a temptation to pursue it, the spies need to draw stark lines to deter subversion from within.

Probe deeper and there is a hint of admiration, though, for the way in which Philby managed to remain consistently loyal to an ideal and carried off his deceit so coolly. ‘I differ from my British colleagues who hated him,’ CIA man Miles Copeland later said. ‘How could I hate him for being a double agent when we were doing the same thing to the other side … He was one of the best intelligence officers this century. The way he kept one step ahead of the hounds was masterful. I wish we had some like him operating for us.’155 One former MI6 officer turned writer also thought Philby ‘may be regarded as a real-life James Bond. His boozy amours, his tough postures, his intelligence expertise, are directly related to the same characteristics in Fleming’s hero.’¹⁵⁶ For Cavendish, Philby was simply doing a job. Young too retained a grudging professional respect.

It is said that new recruits who have arrived at MI6 in recent years, fresh-faced and eager to spy for Britain, have been sat down as part of their training and shown a film of a man many have barely heard of from the distant past. They watch his performance in front of the TV cameras at his mother’s flat in 1955. They watch him lie and try to spot the signs that he is lying. Perhaps this is training them in how to get away with it. But it is also a warning of what betrayal looks like. The film runs to the end and there is silence in the room.