12
When did Aileen Philby, the former store detective, uncover the clues that proved her husband, the Foreign Office high-flier, the doting father, the establishment paragon, was a Soviet spy? Was it when he was summoned home, and lost his job? Or did the appalling realisation come earlier? Did she always suspect there was something fishy about Guy Burgess, her bête noir, who trailed after her husband first to Istanbul, and then Washington? Did the penny drop after Philby locked himself in the basement the day after Burgess’s defection, and then drove away with a mysterious bundle and the garden trowel? Or did doubt dawn earlier still, when Philby refused to divorce his first wife, an Austrian communist?
By 1952, Aileen knew that her husband had lied to her, consistently and coldly, from the moment they first met, and throughout their marriage. The knowledge of his duplicity tipped her into a psychological abyss from which she would never fully emerge. She confronted Kim, who denied everything. The ensuing row, far from dissipating her fears, merely confirmed her conviction that he was lying. To others, she began to hint obliquely at her inner turmoil: ‘To whom should a wife’s allegiance belong?’ she asked a friend. ‘Her country or her husband?’ Questioned by a drunken Tommy Harris at a dinner party, she admitted she was ‘suspicious’ of her husband, but then backtracked and proclaimed him ‘entirely innocent’.
She probably confided in her friend Flora Solomon, who cannot have been wholly surprised since Philby had attempted to recruit her as a Soviet agent back in 1936. Aileen certainly shared her fears with Nicholas Elliott, who blithely laughed off her suspicions. MI5 had assumed that Aileen was joking when she told Elliott that Philby might ‘do a “dis”’. She wasn’t. She lived in fear that he would defect and join his horrible friend Burgess in Moscow, leaving her with five young children and the perpetual shame of having married a traitor. Each time he left the house, she wondered if he would ever return. She threatened to start legal proceedings to gain custody of the children. She began drinking heavily again. Her grip on reality began to slip.
One day Elliott received a telephone call from Aileen, tearful and slurring.
‘Kim’s gone.’
‘Where?’ asked Elliott.
‘I think to Russia.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I got a telegram from Kim.’
At this, even Elliott’s granite loyalty wavered for a moment.
‘What does the telegram say?’ he asked, staggered.
‘It says: “Farewell forever. Love to the Children”.’
Reeling, Elliott called the duty officer at MI5. An alert was immediately sent out to sea ports and airports, with instructions to intercept Philby if he attempted to leave the country.
Oddly, when asked to produce the telegram, Aileen said she could not, saying it had been read to her over the telephone. Puzzled, Elliott made an inquiry at the Post Office, but could find no trace of a telegram sent to Aileen Philby. Once again, he rang the house in Hertfordshire. It was now late evening. This time, Philby answered. At the sound of his familiar voice, Elliott felt a flood of relief.
‘Thank God it’s you at last.’
‘Who were you expecting it to be?’ said Philby.
‘I’m glad you’re home.’
‘Where else would I be at night?’
‘The next time I see you I’ll tell you where else you could have been tonight,’ said Elliott, with a brittle laugh, and rang off.
Aileen had fabricated the entire episode, just as she had invented the story of being attacked in Istanbul, and staged her various maladies and injuries over the years. Elliott was fond and protective of Aileen, but he had become only too familiar with her mental illness. She suffered another series of ‘accidents’, and drove her car into the front of a shop. Her doctor sent her for psychiatric treatment. Philby told his friends that Aileen was ‘insane’. So far from alerting Elliott to the truth, Aileen’s behaviour redoubled his sympathy for his beleaguered friend, not only unjustly accused and deprived of his job, but now under attack from a wife who was plainly imagining things. Within MI6, Aileen’s suspicions were dismissed as the paranoid ravings of a madwoman.
With five children, one unstable wife and two major drinking habits to support, Philby needed money, but employment was hard to find for a man in his forties, who had ostensibly worked for the Foreign Office, but could not explain why he had left. He toyed with resuming his career in journalism, and submitted a number of articles to newspapers, but could find no permanent position. The telephone intercepts ‘disclosed very definitely that Philby was very active in looking for a job’, and failing. Finally, Jack Ivens, a ‘loyal ex-colleague’ from Section V, found him a job in his import-export firm. The salary was a meagre £600 a year. Aileen’s mother provided funds for the family to move into a large and ugly Edwardian house in Crowborough, ‘the poor man’s Surrey’ in Graham Greene’s words. Philby commuted, miserably, to an office in London, where he filled out paperwork, importing Spanish oranges and exporting castor oil to the US. He did not dare try to re-establish contact with his Soviet controllers. ‘Philby was under constant watch,’ wrote Yuri Modin. ‘Several times our counter-surveillance teams reported the presence of MI5 agents hovering in his vicinity.’ He was out in the cold as never before.
Philby had always been a high-functioning, sociable alcoholic. He was fast becoming an ill-functioning one, with a vile temper. MI5, listening in on his telephone line, noted that ‘Peach is apt to get blind drunk and behave abominably to his best friends.’ Long-suffering and loyal, Elliott put up with Philby’s outbursts. Philby leaned heavily on his old friend. In his strange double world, there was no contradiction here: he genuinely valued Elliott’s friendship, needed his support and relied on his advice, while lying to him. Philby did not disguise from Elliott his collapsing marriage but the subject was only ever tackled obliquely. Like most Englishmen of their class, they tended to steer around embarrassing emotional topics.
Elliott lent Philby money when funds ran low, paid his club bills, and took him to watch the cricket at Lord’s. He urged Philby to go on the offensive: ‘You must fight like hell. If I was accused of spying, I would go to the Prime Minister and complain,’ he told him. Philby ‘smiled wanly’ at this suggestion. ‘The whole family went through a bad time,’ wrote Elliott, who tried to buoy up his friend by insisting that his exile from MI6 was strictly temporary; Philby would soon be back in the club, and resuming his career where he had left off.
Sir Stewart Menzies was also firm in his support. On 1 April 1952, he took Philby to dinner at the Travellers’ Club, and asked him ‘whether he wished for any advance of the bonus that was given to him at the time of his resignation’. C later discussed this lunch with Guy Liddell of MI5, who reported:
C seemed to have reached the conclusion that Kim was innocent. I said that I had come to the conclusion that the only thing to do in cases of this kind, where one knew an individual fairly intimately, was to sink one’s personal view and allow those concerned to get on with the job, purely on the basis of ascertainment of facts. Otherwise one was liable to get misled . . . Kim does not, apparently, bear any particular resentment against this department. If he had been in our position he would have reacted in the same way, even down to the question of withholding his passport.
Elliott’s conviction that his friend would soon return to the MI6 fold was echoed by Philby’s main ally in the US. James Angleton assured a colleague in 1952 that ‘Philby would recover from his present predicament and would yet become chief of the British Secret Service.’ Philby knew that would never be. Cut off from his Soviet handlers, stuck in an ill-paid job he loathed, expecting MI5 to pounce at any moment, living with a wife who knew his secret, Philby’s life was spiralling downwards.
Elliott did what he could to bolster Philby’s flagging spirits, dispensing encouragement and support. MI5, combing through the transcripts of Philby’s bugged telephone, expressed surprise and irritation at ‘the extent to which Peach is still in touch with, and subsidised by, MI6’. Philby’s oldest son John was now eleven, and though Philby himself might be committed to destroying the British establishment he was nonetheless anxious to get his sons into a good public school. Eton and Westminster were beyond his budget, but Elliott came up with the solution. He approached his father Claude (now Provost of Eton) who agreed to get John Philby (and later his brother Tommy) into Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire, ‘of which he was governor and which, being heavily endowed, was not too expensive’. The old school tie was still pulling Philby along.
Elliott closely monitored the progress of the Philby case; or rather the lack of it, for the tussle between MI5 and MI6 had settled into acrimonious stalemate. Ronnie Reed, an MI5 officer who had known Philby from the war, noted ‘the intense disagreement between our two services on Philby’. In June 1952, Stewart Menzies retired, to be replaced by his deputy, Major General Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, a tall, military traditionalist, set in his ways. (His lunch never varied: one grilled herring and a glass of water.) Sinclair was just as determined as his predecessor to stand by Philby: the new C ‘refused to let one of his chaps down’. He did, however, agree that serving MI6 officers should be discouraged from socialising with Philby, a directive which Elliott and others simply ignored. MI5, meanwhile, continued to dig for evidence, convinced that other moles must be lurking inside the establishment, and enraged at the way MI6 had closed ranks. The Watchers listened and observed, waiting for Philby to make a slip.
MI5’s telephone intercepts would eventually fill thirty-three volumes: they revealed no espionage on Philby’s part, but laid bare the rapidly worsening state of his marriage. He had started an affair with a woman in London, a civil servant, and frequently did not return home for days at a time. When he did, the couple fought bitterly. Philby took to sleeping in a tent in the garden. He told friends that Aileen had denounced him to the Foreign Office, and this had prevented him from getting a decent job. He even claimed she had tried to kill him. Aileen likewise suspected Philby of harbouring murderous designs. Secretly and unethically, her psychiatrist was passing information to MI5. One report noted: ‘In [Aileen’s] opinion, and that of her psychiatrist, Philby had by a kind of mental cruelty to her “done his best to make her commit suicide”.’ The same psychiatrist suggested that Philby might be homosexual, despite copious evidence to the contrary. With little money coming in from her estranged husband, Aileen was reduced to working in the kitchen of a grand house on Eaton Square, simply to pay the bills. Nicholas Elliott tried to shore her up, with financial and moral support. Her workplace, he wrote, ‘was close enough to our house in Wilton Street to spend her off-duty hours with us’.
After eighteen unhappy months selling castor oil and oranges, Philby found himself jobless again after Jack Ivens’s import-export firm went bust. He scratched around, trying to make a living from freelance journalism, but with scant success. He was now virtually dependent on friends and family. His father, living in Saudi Arabia as an adviser to Ibn Saud, sent what money he could spare. Elliott paid the school fees of the Philby children. Tommy Harris arranged for Philby to write a book about the Spanish Civil War for a London publisher with a £600 advance. The book was never written, and the deal appears to have been a ruse by the wealthy Harris to funnel money to his friend without Philby discovering the source.
Philby continued to socialise with his friends in intelligence, but tensely. One evening Guy Liddell went to dinner with Tommy Harris, and discovered that Philby had been invited too. He greeted Philby ‘in the normal way’, although both knew the situation could hardly have been stranger. MI5 was convinced of Philby’s treachery; Harris himself was now under suspicion, his telephone bugged in case some clue emerged during his conversations with Philby. The dinner guests all tried to pretend that the occasion was no different from the many that had preceded it. Philby seemed ‘somewhat worried’, Liddell wrote in his diary, and left early.
In his darkest moments, Philby considered whether to reactivate his escape plan and defect to Moscow, but there was no way to contact Soviet intelligence without alerting MI5, and he knew it. He was trapped and isolated, aware that he was still just one Soviet defector away from exposure.
*
Vladimir Petrov was a Siberian peasant who, through hard work and docile obedience, had survived Stalin’s purges to rise steadily through the ranks of Soviet intelligence. After three decades of service to communism, he was a KGB colonel, and the rezident at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Publicly, Petrov was a time-server; privately, he was a rebel. He had seen his Siberian village destroyed by famine and forced collectivisation. From his work as a cipher clerk, he had learned the full extent of Stalin’s crimes. In August 1954, he defected in Australia. His wife Evdokia was picked up by a KGB snatch squad before she could do the same, and then rescued as her captors tried to manhandle her, missing one shoe, aboard a plane in Darwin.
As the highest-ranking defector since the war, Petrov brought a mass of information, on ciphers, agent networks, and the names of some 600 KGB officers working as diplomats around the world. He also furnished the first hard evidence that Burgess and Maclean were indeed in the Soviet Union (hitherto this had been assumed, but unverified), and living in Kuibyshev. Even more explosively, he confirmed that they had been tipped off to escape by another British official, a third man. In Whitehall, Fleet Street and beyond, the identity of this shadowy Third Man became the subject of rumour, innuendo and some highly informed speculation.
Philby heard of Petrov’s defection, and waited anxiously for Jim Skardon to reappear on his doorstep, this time with a police posse and arrest warrant. As the weeks passed without a knock on his door, he assumed, rightly, that the defector had not identified him by name. But he was haunted by the ‘worry that Petrov had brought in something substantial that I did not know about’, which might be used to trip him up if he was interrogated again.
Dick White, Philby’s old adversary, was planning precisely such an entrapment, having now taken over as director general of MI5. Guy Liddell had expected to get the post, but his friendships had damaged his reputation beyond repair. MI6 even hinted that Liddell himself might be a gay Soviet spy, pointing out that he ‘had parted from his wife, had a faintly homosexual air about him and, during the war, had been a close friend of Burgess, Philby and Blunt’. Bitterly disappointed, Liddell heartily congratulated White on his appointment, and resigned.
White saw the Petrov defection as an opportunity to flush out Philby once and for all, and he urged Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, to put the revelations about a Third Man out in the open. ‘It will undermine Philby. It will create uncertainty for Philby. We’ll lure him into a new interview and try again to get a confession.’ Eden refused, in part because Sir John Sinclair at MI6 insisted White was ‘pursuing a vendetta against Philby that was best ignored’. The feud between MI5 and MI6 was as fierce and damaging as ever.
Philby could not know it, but his Soviet masters were observing him, and worried. An assessment drawn up by the KGB British section reported that Agent Stanley was ‘desperately short of cash’ and drinking heavily. Yuri Modin asked Moscow what to do, pointing out that Philby had ‘rendered us immense services [and] might need to be reactivated in the future’. The Centre ordered that Philby be given ‘a large sum of money’, and a reassurance that the Soviet Union would stand by him. The KGB was not acting out of generosity, or even loyalty, but hard-headed pragmatism: a drunken and destitute spy was a liability, who might confess, or demand to be extricated. A lump of cash would keep him stable, it was hoped, and in place. But the handover (like most of Moscow’s directives) was easier ordered than done, since Philby was still under close surveillance. Moreover, Modin was instructed not to make direct personal contact; his mission was to pay Philby, under the noses of MI5, without actually seeing him. The KGB officer had managed to spirit Burgess and Maclean out of England; but getting Philby to stay put would be rather harder.
*
On the evening of 16 June 1954, Professor Anthony Blunt, former MI5 officer, Soviet spy and distinguished art historian, prepared to give a lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, of which he was a director. The subject was the Arch of Gallienus, a Roman triumphal arch in danger of demolition to make way for a modern housing project. The audience was composed of eager classicists, art students and learned members of the public who had read about the lecture in The Times and wanted to support the worthy cause of protecting Rome’s classical heritage. In the front row, facing the lectern, sat a squarely-built, fair-haired young man who had signed the visitors’ book in the name Greenglass, and identified himself as Norwegian.
Blunt’s long, baggy face wore an expression of scholarly concern as he distributed photographs of the threatened arch, before launching into an attack on the ‘villainous Italian authorities’ who wanted to do away with it. At the end, everyone clapped, and none more enthusiastically than Greenglass – although he had never been to Italy, knew nothing about classical architecture and could not have cared less if every arch in Rome was bulldozed and covered over in concrete. At the end of the lecture, Professor Blunt was mobbed, as he often was, by a bevy of enthusiastic, upholstered ladies keen to talk about art, who ‘vied with one another in showing off their knowledge’. Greenglass hung back on the fringes, and then, rather abruptly, barged through the throng, elbowing one of the professor’s admirers in the ribs as he did so, and thrust a postcard of a Renaissance painting into Blunt’s hand.
‘Excuse me,’ asked the rude Norwegian. ‘Do you know where I can find this picture?’
Blunt turned the postcard over, while the artistic ladies looked on frostily. On the back was written: ‘Tomorrow. 8 p.m. Angel’. The distinctive handwriting, Blunt knew at once, was that of Guy Burgess.
Blunt gave his questioner ‘a long stare’, and recognised him as Yuri Modin, the Soviet spy handler he had last seen in 1951, just before Burgess and Maclean fled. Then he looked back at the postcard and its message. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Yes.’
The next evening Blunt and Modin met in the Angel pub in Islington off the Caledonian Road, a nondescript drinking hole they had used for clandestine meetings in the past. They spoke first about Blunt’s situation – he had been interviewed by MI5, but did not yet seem to be a suspect – before moving on to Philby. Blunt reported that his fellow spy was in poor shape, jobless and penniless, and had already been subjected to a number of hostile interviews by MI5. Modin asked Blunt to pass on some cash to Philby. Reluctantly – for he had long ago forsaken espionage in favour of protecting Roman arches – Blunt agreed.
A few days later, Philby drove from Crowborough to Tonbridge, and bought a ticket for the first train to London. He waited until all the other passengers were aboard and the platform was deserted before boarding. At Vauxhall, he took the Underground to Tottenham Court Road, where he purchased a large coat and hat. For an hour, he wandered around, looking in shop windows to see if he was being followed, then had a drink in a bar, before buying a cinema ticket. He took a seat in the back row. Halfway through the performance, he slipped out. No one seemed to follow him. But for two more hours he walked aimlessly, then hopped on a bus, then jumped off again. By evening, he was in North London: ‘I was virtually certain I was clean.’
At dusk, three spies converged on a small square off the Caledonian Road. It appears that Modin, following orders, made no direct contact with Philby that night and spoke only to Blunt as he passed over the package, while Philby kept his distance, ready to run. In Modin’s melodramatic recollection, ‘the dark silhouette kept pace with us along the tree-lined path; a solid, foursquare figure, shrouded in an overcoat’. Philby returned to Crowborough with £5,000 in cash and a ‘refreshed spirit’, buoyed by the knowledge that he was back in contact with Soviet intelligence after a four-year hiatus. Modin had also passed on a reassurance, through Blunt, that the defector ‘Petrov knew nothing about his career as a Soviet agent’. The handover in the dark London park transformed both Philby’s finances and his state of mind. ‘I was no longer alone.’
Philby’s Soviet friends had rallied to him; his British friends would now do the same. At around the time of the Petrov defection, a group of officers within MI6, led by Nicholas Elliott, launched a concerted campaign to clear his name.
Elliott had by now taken up a new post as head of MI6’s London station. Codenamed ‘BIN’ and based in Londonderry House, Victoria, the London station acted, in effect, like any other MI6 outpost, but on British soil, with a staff of twenty officers running intelligence operations against diplomats, businessmen and spies, recruiting agents in foreign embassies, and monitoring the activities of visiting dignitaries. Elliott’s new role enabled him to behave like a spy abroad, but within easy reach of his club.
By 1954, a distinct faction had emerged within MI6, with considerable influence over the chief, Sir John Sinclair: these were the Young Turks of the intelligence service, men like Elliott who had learned the spy game in the heady days of war when, with sufficient grit and imagination, anything had seemed possible. Inside the service, Elliott and his like were known as the ‘Robber Barons’, swashbuckling types with an acute sense of their own importance and little respect for civilian authority. They believed in covert action, taking risks and, whenever necessary, breaking the rules. Above all, they believed in intelligence as a sort of patriotic religion, a British bulwark against barbarism. George Kennedy Young, a good friend of both Elliott and Philby who would rise to become deputy director of MI6, put into words the creed of this increasingly influential and ambitious group. ‘It is the spy who has been called on to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests,’ Young insisted, with an arrogance that did not bode well.
Men’s minds are shaped of course by their environments and we spies, although we have our professional mystique, do perhaps live closer to the realities and hard facts of international relations than other practitioners of government. We are relatively free of the problems of status, of precedence, departmental attitudes and evasions of personal responsibility, which create the official cast of mind. We do not have to develop, like Parliamentarians conditioned by a lifetime, the ability to produce the ready phrase, the smart reply and the flashing smile. And so it is not surprising these days that the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.
Men like Young and Elliott saw themselves as Britain’s secret guardians, members of a chosen brotherhood unconstrained by normal conventions. Kim Philby had been a role model for many of the Robber Barons; his wordly savoir-faire and wartime successes affirmed their sense of collective identity. They now set out to rescue him.
On 20 July 1955, ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair wrote to Dick White, his counterpart in MI5, claiming that Buster Milmo’s interrogation of Kim Philby had been ‘biased’, and that the former MI6 officer had been the ‘victim of a miscarriage of justice’. In a later memo to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, ‘C’ summed up the case for Philby’s defence:
The Milmo Report, which produces no single piece of direct evidence to show that Philby was a Soviet agent or that he was the ‘Third Man’, is therefore a case for the prosecution inadmissible at law and unsuccessful in security intelligence. It is constructed of suppositious and circumstantial evidence, summing up in a circular argument everything the ingenuity of a prosecutor could devise against a suspect. It seems likely to remain as a permanently accusing finger pointed at Philby [who] was in fact convicted of nothing by the investigation in 1951 and despite four years of subsequent investigation is still convicted of nothing. It is entirely contrary to the English tradition for a man to have to prove his innocence … in a case where the prosecution has nothing but suspicion to go upon.
The case should be re-examined, he said, and Philby given an opportunity to defend himself. ‘Produce the evidence, and there’ll be no further dispute,’ Sinclair told White. White reluctantly agreed that Philby should be interviewed once more, knowing that the case against him was not much stronger than it had been in 1951. The stage was now set for a final showdown, and Elliott, Philby’s ‘greatest defender’, would be waiting in the wings to stage-manage the drama.
On 18 September, the People newspaper broke the story of Vladimir Petrov’s defection, with a series of dramatic revelations: Burgess and Maclean had both been recruited as Soviet agents while students at Cambridge; their flight to Moscow, just as Maclean was about to be arrested, had been orchestrated by the Soviet intelligence service; these were not ‘missing diplomats’, as the government had maintained for so long, but spies on the run. British secrecy laws had been used to hide the truth and shield the government from embarrassment.
Harold Macmillan, the new Foreign Secretary, faced a major crisis: ‘We are going to have to say something,’ he said gloomily. Five days later, the government issued an eight-page White Paper purporting to explain the Burgess and Maclean affair. It was a peculiar mixture of half-truth and evasion that played down the scandal and made no mention of Kim Philby, whose name was now being widely whispered, and in some cases, shouted. At a dinner party, Aileen Philby rose unsteadily to her feet and upbraided her husband: ‘I know you are the Third Man.’ Even Philby’s wife was denouncing him in public; the press would not be far behind. The White Paper was dismissed as a cover-up.
On the other side of the Atlantic, J. Edgar Hoover was as convinced of Philby’s guilt as James Angleton was sure of his innocence, and enraged at Britain’s failure to arrest him. The FBI chief decided to bring matters to a head, with a characteristic act of subterfuge. But first, Philby prepared for one last interrogation.
On 7 October, two weeks after the publication of the White Paper, Philby presented himself at an MI6 safe house near Sloane Square, where he was ushered into a room furnished with a patterned sofa and chairs arranged around a small table; on one wall stood an ancient sideboard with a telephone on top. Inside the telephone was a high-quality microphone. An amplifier, placed under the floorboards beneath Philby’s chair, fed sound to the microphone, which was then relayed to Leconfield House, MI5 headquarters. Here the conversation would be recorded on acetate gramophone records, and then handed to typists who would transcribe every word.
Philby was nervous. This would be his fourth formal interrogation. Despite Modin’s reassurances, he feared Petrov might have armed the investigators with some damning new clue. Philby had told MI6 he ‘welcomed the chance to clear his name’, but in truth he was tired, and worried. He braced himself for another flaying.
Instead, what he experienced was closer to a fireside chat than an inquisition, an interview utterly different from any that had come before. A committee of inquiry, set up by Macmillan, had formally ruled that this round of questioning should be the responsibility of MI6, not MI5. This would not be an inquisition, in the manner of Buster Milmo, but an internal review of the situation carried out by two of Philby’s former colleagues ‘who knew him well’. It seems probable that one of them was Nick Elliott.
As the conversation started, and the recording machines began to spin, MI5 officers listened with mounting fury as Philby was given the lightest possible grilling by his friends. ‘To call it an interrogation would be a travesty,’ one MI5 officer later wrote.
It was an in-house MI6 interview . . . they took him gently over familiar ground. First his communist past, then his MI6 career and his friendship with Guy Burgess. Philby stuttered and stammered and protested his innocence. But listening to the disembodied voices, the lies seemed so clear. Whenever Philby floundered, one or other of his questioners guided him to an acceptable answer. ‘Well, I suppose such and such could be an explanation.’ Philby would gratefully agree and the interview would move on.
Philby was sent home with a friendly handshake and a not-guilty verdict: ‘You may be pleased to know that we have come to a unanimous decision about your innocence’. Philby was jubilant. ‘The trail had become stale and muddy,’ he wrote. ‘The fact that I had made no attempt to escape over a long period was beginning to tell heavily in my favour.’ When Dick White read the transcripts, he was ‘livid’; the MI5 transcribers formally put on record their ‘belief that one of the questioners was prejudiced in Philby’s favour, repeatedly helping him find answers to awkward questions and never pressing questions which he failed to answer’. The Robber Barons had launched a highly effective counter-attack. But Philby was not yet safe.
Just over a week later, on Sunday 23 October 1955, the Philby family awoke to find their home surrounded by a pack of journalists in full hue and cry. That morning in New York, the Sunday News had run a story naming Philby as the ‘Third Man’, the ‘tipster’ who had helped the defectors to flee. This was the work of Hoover, who had leaked Philby’s name to a tame journalist, to force the British into launching a full judicial investigation. For more than four years Philby’s name had been kept out of the newspapers, despite being common knowledge on Fleet Street. Now the hunt was on. ‘The house at Crowborough was besieged,’ reported Elliott, who advised Philby to hold off the press as long as possible. If British newspapers repeated what the Sunday News had reported, they could be sued for libel. But Philby’s name was now in print, and everyone was talking about the Third Man. It took two days more before the dam burst.