3
Philby’s father nicknamed his son Kim after the eponymous hero in the popular Rudyard Kipling novel. Brought up by an Indian nanny, Philby’s first language was a sort of nursery Punjabi; like Kipling’s Kim, he was a white child who could pass for an Indian. The name stuck forever, but its aptness would not emerge for years. The fictional Kim has two distinct personalities; he is a two-sided man.
Something I owe to the soil that grew
More to the life that fed,
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.
The soil that grew Kim Philby had produced a conventional upper-class, public school-educated Englishman; the life that fed him had created something entirely different, and it was a life that his dear friend Nicholas Elliott knew nothing about. He did not know that Philby had become a Soviet agent in the very year that Elliott had gone up to Cambridge; he did not know that Philby’s idyllic marriage was a fraud, and that his friend was really married to an Austrian communist spy; he did not know that Philby had joined MI6, not as an eager patriot like himself, but rather, in Philby’s own words, as a ‘penetration agent working in the Soviet interest’. And he did not know that during the convivial Sunday lunches in St Albans, the boozy evenings at the Harris home, the drinks in the basement of MI6 and the bar at White’s, Philby was hard at work, absorbing his friends’ secrets as fast as the gin, and then passing them all to Moscow.
The seeds of Philby’s double life lay in his childhood, his father, his upbringing and the intense ideological conversion that shaped him in early adulthood. Philby maintained that his dual existence emerged from an unwavering belief in a set of political principles that he discovered at the age of eighteen, and never abandoned: what Philby’s enemies described as betrayal, he saw as loyalty. But there was more to Philby than mere ideology. Like many late-Empire products of the establishment, he had an inborn faith in his ability, and right, to change and rule the world. This he shared with Elliott, though their views of how the world should be run could not have been more opposed. Both were imperialists, but for rival empires. Beneath Philby’s golden charm lay a thick substratum of conceit; the charmer invites you into his world, though never too far, and only on his terms. The English love their secrets, the knowledge that they know a little more than the man standing next to them; when that man is also a secret-keeper, its redoubles what Trevor-Roper called ‘the exquisite relish of ruthless, treacherous, private power’. Philby tasted the powerful drug of deception as a youth, and remained addicted to infidelity for the rest of his life.
Kim was his father’s pet, and project. Like Claude Elliott, St John Philby was ambitious for his son, but showed him little affection. He moulded him for Westminster and Cambridge, and was proud when his son achieved those goals; but mostly he was absent, charging around the Arab world courting controversy, and searching for celebrity. ‘My ambition is fame, whatever that may mean,’ he said. St John Philby was a notable scholar, linguist and ornithologist, and he did achieve fame of a sort, but might have found more lasting appreciation had he not been so profoundly irritating, wilful and arrogant. He was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth: he never backed down, or listened, or compromised. He was equally swift to give and take offence, and ferociously critical of everyone except himself. He alternately neglected and hectored his wife Dora. He was snobbish, and in many ways conventional, but also instinctively contrarian, forever bucking the system and then complaining furiously when the system failed to reward him. Kim idolised him, and loathed him.
At school, the young Philby was ‘constantly aware of his father’s long shadow’. Alongside his fine academic record, and general popularity, the boy showed a small streak of mendacity, prompting some parental disquiet: ‘He should always be careful to be truthful whatever the consequences,’ observed his father. Kim arrived at Cambridge at the age of seventeen on a history scholarship, having inherited both his father’s intellectual self-confidence, and his determination to swim against the tide.
The violent ideological currents sweeping Cambridge in the 1930s had created a vortex which quickly swept up Philby and many other clever, angry, alienated young men. He made friends on the political left, and some on the extreme left. Fascism was on the march in Europe, and only communism, it seemed to many, could oppose it. Late at night, over copious drinks, in panelled rooms, students argued, debated, tried on one ideological outfit or another, and, in a small handful of cases, embraced violent revolution. The most significant, and certainly the most colourful, of Philby’s radical new friends was Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, amoral, witty, supremely dangerous and loud in his advocacy of communism. Another was Donald Maclean, a clever young linguist destined for the Foreign Office.
Philby joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society. He canvassed on behalf of the Labour Party. But there was no ‘sudden conversion’, no revolutionary epiphany when the religion of communism seized his soul. Instead, the student Philby moved slowly leftwards, and then faster after visiting Berlin in 1933 and witnessing at first hand, like Elliott, the brutality of Nazism during an anti-Jewish rally. Unlike many of his friends, Philby never joined the Communist Party. His beliefs were radical, but simple: the rich had exploited the poor for too long; the only bulwark against fascism was Soviet communism, ‘the inner fortress of the world movement’; capitalism was doomed and crumbling; the British establishment was poisoned by Nazi leanings. ‘I left the university,’ he wrote, ‘with the conviction that my life must be devoted to communism.’ Yet he wore his convictions so lightly they were all but invisible. With the £14 he was awarded for his degree, he bought the collected works of Karl Marx. But there is no evidence he ever studied them in depth, or even read them. Though politics would dictate his life, he was not greatly interested in political theory. As Elliott later observed, ‘I can hardly see him as a lecturer in dialectical materialism.’
Before leaving Cambridge, Philby sought out his supervisor, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and asked him how best he might ‘devote his life to the communist cause’. It was a measure of how deeply Marxism had penetrated the university that Philby felt no danger in asking such a loaded question, and Dobb had no qualms in answering it. Dobb directed him to Louis Gibarti, a Paris agent of the Comintern, the international communist organisation, who in turn furnished an introduction to the Austrian communist underground. It was that easy: the radical left had its own Old Boy network.
In the autumn of 1933, Philby travelled to Vienna, ostensibly to improve his German before applying to join the Foreign Office – in reality to witness, and if possible take part in, the battle between left and right then under way in the Austrian capital. Engelbert Dollfuss, Austria’s extreme right-wing dictator, had already suspended the constitution and outlawed strikes and demonstrations in his efforts to suppress the socialist movement. A full-scale conflict was imminent, and the situation, as Philby put it, was ‘at a crisis point’. Philby made his way to the address provided by Gibarti, and introduced himself to its occupants, Israel and Gisella Kohlman, and their daughter Alice – with whom he promptly fell in love. Alice, known as Litzi, was twenty-three, dark-haired, Jewish, vivacious, direct to the point of bluntness, and newly divorced, having married at eighteen. When Philby met Litzi, he was still a virgin and a political naif; she swiftly attended to both deficiencies. Litzi was a fully committed revolutionary and, according to one contemporary, a ‘tremendous little sexpot’.
Litzi was active in the Viennese communist underground, and in contact with Soviet intelligence. She had spent two weeks in prison for subversive activities. Philby was instantly besotted. They made love in the snow. (‘Actually quite warm, once you get used to it,’ he recalled to a later girlfriend.) Philby had been in Austria for only a few weeks, when Dollfuss moved to crush the Leftists, arresting socialist leaders, banning trades unions and catapulting Austria into a brief but vicious civil war. Philby and Litzi plunged into the fray on behalf of the Revolutionary Socialists, the short-lived alliance of socialists and communists, passing messages, drafting leaflets, and helping to smuggle wanted men and women out of the country. The left was crushed in four days; 1,500 people were arrested, and the socialist leaders were executed. Litzi was on the wanted list, and the police were closing in, but Philby’s British passport would offer her protection: on 24 February 1934, he married Litzi in Vienna Town Hall. This was more than just a marriage made in Marxism; as Mrs Philby she could flee with her new husband to the safety of Britain. Litzi, or ‘Lizzy’ as he called her, may be the only woman to whom Philby remained both ideologically and sexually faithful. ‘Even though the basis of our relationship was political to some extent, I truly loved her and she loved me.’
A few weeks later, the newlyweds arrived in London, where they lodged with Philby’s mother. Conventional Dora Philby, desperate to keep up appearances despite a perennial shortage of money, was not best pleased to find her son married to a foreign communist. She regarded his politics as another passing adolescent phase, like acne. ‘I do hope Kim gets a job to get him off this bloody communism,’ Mrs Philby wrote to her husband in Saudi Arabia. ‘He’s not quite extreme yet, but may become so.’ St John was unconcerned by his son’s radicalism. ‘Excess can always be toned down afterwards,’ he declared.
Just a few weeks after his return from Vienna, Philby sat on a bench in Regent’s Park, waiting to meet a ‘man of decisive importance’ who, Litzi had promised, would change his life. When Philby had asked her who he was, and what made him so important, she clammed up.
Out of the June sunshine appeared a short, stout man in his early thirties with curly fair hair and intelligent eyes. He spoke English with a strong East European accent, and introduced himself as ‘Otto’. Philby never forgot their first conversation. Otto spoke about art and music, his love of Paris and his dislike of London. This, Philby reflected, was a ‘man of considerable cultural background’. Philby was entranced: ‘He was a marvellous man. Simply marvellous. I felt that immediately. The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment.’ That was a quality many found in Philby too. Gradually, their conversation drifted towards politics, and then the works of Marx and Lenin, which Otto seemed to know by heart. Philby, in turn, described his political experiences in Cambridge, his activities in Vienna, and his wish to join the Communist Party. They spoke in euphemisms, with Otto hinting that he could put ‘important and interesting work’ in Philby’s direction. As with most espionage relationships, this one began not with politics, but with friendship. ‘I trusted him from the start,’ wrote Philby. ‘It was an amazing conversation.’ They agreed to meet again.
Otto’s real name, which Philby would not learn for decades, was Arnold Deutsch. He was the chief recruiter for Soviet intelligence in Britain, the principal architect of what would later become known as the Cambridge Spy Ring. Born of Czech Jewish parents, Arnold and his family had moved to Austria when he was a child. Prodigiously clever, he emerged from Vienna University after just five years with a doctorate in chemistry, a fervent commitment to communism, and a passionate interest in sex. His first career was as publisher and publicist for the German sexologist Wilhelm Reich – the ‘prophet of the better orgasm’ who sought to bring sexual enlightenment to the prudish Viennese as part of the ‘sex-pol’ (sexual politics) movement, which equated sexual repression with fascist authoritarianism. Reich developed the radical, though slightly implausible, theory that ‘a poor man’s sexual performance led him to fascism’. While promoting Reich’s idea that better sex makes better revolutionaries, Deutsch was also secretly working for Soviet intelligence, having undergone a training course in Moscow. The Gestapo arrested Deutsch briefly in 1933; the anti-pornography section of the Vienna police were also on his trail, on account of his sex-pol activities. A year later, he arrived in Britain, to begin a postgraduate degree in Phonetics and Psychology at University College London, while working as a spy-recruiter. Deutsch had relatives in the UK, notably his wealthy cousin Oscar, the founder of the Odeon cinema chain, which was said to stand for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation’. One Deutsch was doing well out of British capitalism; the other was hellbent on destroying it.
Deutsch was an ‘illegal’, espionage parlance for a spy operating without diplomatic status. His mission was to recruit radical students at the best universities (using his academic work as cover), who might later rise to positions of power and influence. Deutsch was on the hunt for long-term, deep-cover, ideological spies who could blend invisibly into the British establishment – for Soviet intelligence was playing a long game, laying down seed corn that could be harvested many years hence, or left dormant for ever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.
Philby’s introduction to Deutsch appears to have been arranged by Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian communist friend of Litzi’s. Born Edith Suschitzky, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese publisher, Edith married an English doctor and fellow communist named Alexander Tudor-Hart, and moved to England in 1930, where she worked as a photographer and part-time talent-scout for the NKVD, under the remarkably unimaginative codename ‘Edith’. She had been under MI5 surveillance since 1931 but not, fatefully, on the day she led Philby to meet Deutsch in Regent’s Park.
Philby was just the sort of recruit Deutsch was looking for. He was ambitious, well connected and devoted to the cause, but unobtrusively: unlike others, Philby had never made his radical views obvious. He sought a career in diplomacy, journalism or the civil service, all excellent perches for a spy. Deutsch was also under the impression that St John Philby was an agent of British intelligence, with access to important secret material.
At their second meeting, Deutsch asked Philby if he was willing to act as an undercover agent for the communist cause. Philby did not hesitate: ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force,’ he wrote. That was a most telling remark: the attraction of this new role lay in its exclusivity. In some ways, Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join. Westminster School and Cambridge University are elite clubs; MI6 is an even more exclusive fellowship; working secretly for the NKVD within MI6 placed Philby in a club of one, the most elite member of a secret inner ring. ‘Of all the passions,’ wrote Lewis, ‘the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.’
‘My future looked romantic,’ Philby wrote. Deutsch laid out a vision of that future: Philby and Litzi must break off all communist contacts; rather than join the party, he should establish a new political image as a right-winger, even a Nazi-sympathiser. He must become, to all outward appearances, a conventional member of the very class he was committed to opposing. ‘By background, education, appearance and manners you are an intellectual, a bourgeois. You have a marvellous career ahead of you. A bourgeois career,’ Deutsch told him. ‘The anti-fascist movement needs people who can enter into the bourgeoisie.’ Hidden inside the establishment, Philby could aid the revolution in a ‘real and palpable way’. Deutsch began to instruct Philby on the rudiments of tradecraft: how to arrange a meeting; where to leave messages; how to detect if his telephone was bugged; how to spot a tail, and how to lose one. He presented Philby with a new Minox subminiature camera, and taught him how to copy documents. Philby memorised Deutsch’s lessons ‘like poetry’. His double life had begun.
Deutsch gave Philby the affectionate codename ‘Sonny’ (Söhnchen in German), and reported his catch to the London rezident, the regional control officer of the NKVD (the predecessor organisation to the KGB), who passed on the news to Moscow Centre, the Soviet intelligence headquarters: ‘We have recruited the son of an Anglo agent, advisor to Ibn-Saud, Philby.’ Moscow was impressed: ‘What are his prospects for a diplomatic career? Are they realistic? Will he choose his own path or will his father “suggest” he meet someone and discuss it? That would be good.’ Deutsch instructed his new protégé to draw up a list of acquaintances and contemporaries, from Oxford as well as Cambridge, who might also be recruited to the cause. He told him to discreetly explore whatever documents St John Philby kept in his office at home, and to photograph ‘the most interesting’.
Asking Philby to spy on his own father was surely a test of his commitment, and Philby passed it easily. He did what was asked of him without hesitation. Deutsch reported that his new recruit ‘refers to his parents, who are well-to-do bourgeois, and his entire social milieu with unfeigned contempt and hatred’. Philby was doubtless putting on a display of class-warrior zeal for Deutsch, for he was spellbound by his spymaster, ‘his marvellous education, his humanity, his fidelity to building a new society’. They met often, always in ‘the remoter open spaces in London’, and once in Paris. Deutsch flattered and inspired his young ward. When Philby’s relationship with Litzi began to falter, the older man dispensed marital advice. (‘His wife was his first lover in his life,’ Deutsch reported to Moscow, keen, as ever, to establish a link between sex and socialist zeal. ‘When difficulties arose in their relationship, they would confide in me and both followed my advice.’)
Philby was bonded, ideologically and emotionally, to his charismatic Soviet controller. ‘I sometimes felt we had been friends since childhood,’ he wrote. ‘I was certain that my life and myself interested him not so much professionally as on a human level.’ The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated. Deutsch made a careful study of Philby’s psychology, the flashes of insecurity beneath the debonair exterior, the unpredictable stammer, his veiled resentment of a domineering father. Deutsch reported to the Centre that Philby had potential but needed ‘constant encouragement’: ‘Söhnchen comes from a peculiar family. His father is considered at present to be the most distinguished expert on the Arab world . . . he is an ambitious tyrant and wanted to make a great man out of his son.’ Deutsch noted his acolyte’s intellectual curiosity, his fluctuating moods, his old world manners, and his resolve: ‘It’s amazing that such a young man is so widely and deeply knowledgeable . . . He is so serious he forgets that he is only twenty-five.’
Deutsch urged Philby to get a job in journalism – ‘Once you’re inside, you’ll look around and then decide which way to go’ – and he reassured Moscow that Philby’s family contacts would ensure swift promotion. ‘He has many friends from the best homes.’ Philby soon obtained a job as a sub-editor at the World Review of Reviews, a literary and political monthly, before moving on to the Anglo-German Trade Gazette, a magazine devoted to improving economic relations between Britain and Germany which was partly financed by the Nazi government. Completing this lurch from extreme left (secretly) to extreme right (publicly), he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a society formed in 1935 to foster closer understanding with Germany. A sump for the forces of appeasement and Nazi admiration, the fellowship included politicians, aristocrats and business leaders, some naive or gullible, others rampantly fascist. With views diametrically opposed to his own, such people offered Philby ideal political camouflage, as well as information, eagerly received in Moscow, about links between the Nazis and their British sympathisers. Philby travelled regularly to Berlin on behalf of the fellowship, and even met the German foreign minister, von Ribbentrop. He later claimed to have found playing the part of a keen young fascist ‘profoundly repulsive’ because ‘in the eyes of my friends, even conservative ones, but honest conservatives, I looked pro-Nazi’. Former friends from the left were aghast at his apparent conversion, and some shunned him. Deutsch commiserated, telling Philby he knew ‘how difficult it is to leave old friends’.
Litzi and Philby’s commitment to communism proved more durable than their commitment to each other; they separated, without rancour, and she moved to Paris. To Moscow’s surprise, Philby found nothing of intelligence value among his father’s papers. The NKVD was convinced that someone as well connected as St John Philby, who travelled widely and freely, must be a spy. ‘It seems unlikely that his father . . . would not be a close and intimate collaborator with the Intelligence Service.’ Not for the last time, Moscow elevated its erroneous expectations into fact. Meanwhile Philby dutifully handed over a list of potential recruits among his left-wing Cambridge friends, including Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.
*
Maclean, still a committed communist, was by now in the Foreign Office. Philby invited him to dinner, and hinted that there was important clandestine work to be done on behalf of the party. ‘The people I could introduce you to are very serious.’ Philby instructed Maclean to carry a book with a bright yellow cover into a particular café on a given day. ‘Otto’ was waiting for him, and duly signed up this ‘very serious and aloof’ young man with ‘good connections’. Codenamed ‘Orphan’, Maclean, too, began to shed his radical past. ‘Sonny has high praise for Orphan,’ Deutsch reported to Moscow. Burgess seemed a more dubious prospect: ‘Very smart . . . but a bit superficial and could let slip in some circumstances.’
Characteristically, Burgess sensed he was being denied admission to a most enjoyable and risky party, and brazenly barged his way in. One night he confronted Maclean: ‘Do you think that I believe for even one jot that you have stopped being a communist? You’re simply up to something.’ A little reluctantly, Deutsch added Burgess to his roster. Burgess duly announced, with maximum fanfare, that he had swapped Marx for Mussolini, and was now a devotee of Italian fascism. It was Burgess who subsequently introduced Deutsch to yet another recruit, Anthony Blunt, already an art historian of note. Slowly, discreetly, with paternal diligence and Philby’s help, Deutsch added one link after another to the Cambridge spy chain.
While Deutsch handled recruitment, much of the day-to-day management of the spies was carried out by another ‘illegal’, Theodore Stephanovich Maly, a Hungarian former monk who, as an army chaplain during the First World War, had been taken prisoner in the Carpathians and witnessed such appalling horrors that he emerged a revolutionary: ‘I lost my faith in God and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I became a communist and have always remained one.’ After training as an agent-runner, he arrived in London in 1932, under the alias Paul Hardt. For a spy, Maly was conspicuous, standing six feet four inches tall, with a ‘shiny grey complexion’, and gold fillings in his front teeth. But he was a most subtle controller, who shared Deutsch’s admiration for Philby, describing him as ‘an inspirational figure, a true comrade and idealist’. The feeling was reciprocated; in Philby’s mind the bewitching personalities of his handlers were indistinguishable from their political allure: ‘Both of them were intelligent and experienced professionals, as well as genuinely very good people.’
Philby’s work for the Anglo-German Trade Gazette came to an abrupt end in 1936 when the Nazis withdrew financial support. But by then, Moscow Centre had other plans for him. Civil war had erupted in Spain between the Republican forces and the fascist-backed Nationalist rebels under General Franco. Philby was instructed to spy on the Nationalists, using freelance journalism as a cover, and report back on troop movements, communications, morale, and the military support being provided to Franco’s forces by Germany and Italy. Moscow would pay for his passage. Philby ‘handles our money very carefully’, Deutsch told his bosses. In Spain, Philby quickly ingratiated himself with Franco’s press officers, and began sending well-informed articles to British newspapers, notably The Times. On a return trip to Britain, he persuaded Britain’s most influential paper to appoint him special correspondent in Spain: ‘We have great difficulty getting any information at all from the Franco side,’ Ralph Deakin, The Times’s foreign editor, told Philby.
Meanwhile Philby assiduously gathered intelligence for his Soviet spymasters, on ‘unit strengths and locations, gun calibres, tank performance’ and other military information. This he sent in code to ‘Mademoiselle Dupont’ in Paris (to an address which he later learned was the Soviet embassy itself). He began an affair with Frances Doble, Lady Lindsay-Hogg, an aristocratic former actress ten years his senior, a supporter of Franco and ‘a royalist of the most right-wing kind’ who gave him access to Franco’s inner circle. ‘I would be lying if I said I started the affair only for the sake of my work,’ he later observed. Philby was untroubled about making love to someone whose opinions he despised.
Philby’s controller in Paris, a Latvian named Ozolin-Haskins, was full of praise: ‘He works with great willingness [and] always knows what might be of interest to us. He never asks for money. He lives modestly.’ Nor did Philby neglect his role as a recruiter for the cause. During a return trip to London, he lunched with Flora Solomon, the Marks and Spencer executive who would later introduce him to Aileen. Despite her inherited wealth, and marriage to a general-turned-stockbroker, Flora Solomon was firmly on the left. According to one MI5 officer, she had ‘obviously been in the thick of things in mid-1930s, part inspiration, part fellow accomplice, and part courier’. During the conversation, Philby remarked, in an intense undertone, that he was ‘doing a very dangerous job for peace and that he needed help. Would she help him in his task? It would be a great thing if she would join the cause.’ He did not specify what his ‘important work for peace’ entailed, but insisted ‘You should be doing it too, Flora.’ Solomon, surprised at what was unmistakably an invitation to take on covert and dangerous work for communism, turned down the offer but told Philby ‘he could always come to her if he was desperate’. She would not forget that strange exchange.
In Moscow a still more radical plan was being hatched for Agent Sonny. Philby had already been asked to report on General Franco’s security arrangements. Now Moscow Centre wondered whether he might be able to get close enough to the Caudillo to kill him, and deliver a devastating blow to the Nazi-backed Nationalists. The officer with the unenviable task of passing on this idea was Theodore Maly, who knew that it was virtually impossible to achieve and, even if possible, suicidal. Maly discussed the proposal with Philby, but then sent a message to the Centre quashing the idea, fully aware that in doing so he was inviting Moscow’s mortal displeasure. ‘Even if he had been able to get close to Franco . . . then he, despite his willingness, would not be able to do what is expected of him. For all his loyalty and willingness to sacrifice himself, he does not have the physical courage and other qualities necessary.’ The plan was quietly dropped, but it was another mark of Philby’s growing status in Soviet eyes: in just four years he had gone from a raw recruit to a potential assassin. The Times was also impressed with his performance: ‘They are very pleased with Kim, they have the highest opinion of him,’ the diarist Harold Nicolson told Guy Burgess. ‘He has made a name for himself very quickly.’ That reputation expanded hugely when, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, New Year’s Eve 1937, Philby narrowly avoided being killed by a Republican shell (of Russian manufacture) while covering the battle of Teruel. The award of a medal from Franco himself convinced the Nationalists that Philby was, as one Spanish officer put it, ‘a decent chap’.
In the summer of 1939, with Franco victorious in Spain, Philby returned to London to a warm reception from his colleagues at The Times. There was no equivalent welcome from his Soviet spy friends, for the simple reason that they were all dead, or had disappeared, swept away by Stalin’s Terror. In the wild, murderous paranoia of the Purges, anyone with foreign links was suspected of disloyalty, and the outposts of Soviet intelligence came under particular suspicion. Theodore Maly was among the first to be recalled to Moscow, an obvious suspect on account of his religious background: ‘I know that as a former priest I haven’t got a chance. But I’ve decided to go there so that nobody can say “That priest might have been a real spy after all”.’ Maly was tortured in the cells of the Lubiyanka, headquarters of the secret police, until he eventually confessed to being a German spy, and was then shot in the head.
The fate of Arnold Deutsch has never been fully explained. Philby would later claim he had died when a ship taking him to America, the Donbass, was torpedoed by a U-boat, thus making him a victim of Hitler’s aggression rather than Stalin’s. The KGB history reports he died en route to South America, but another KGB report claims he was heading to New York. It seems just as probable that bright-eyed ‘Otto’, founder-recruiter of the Cambridge spy chain, shared Maly’s fate. As a foreign-born, Jewish intellectual who had spent years abroad, he was a likely candidate for purging.
The task of running the Cambridge spies was taken over by one Grigori Grafpen, until he too was arrested and sent to the Gulag. Philby’s controller in Paris, Ozolin-Haskins, was shot in Moscow in 1937. His successor, Boris Shapak, lasted two more years before he too was ordered home to be killed. A few defected before they could be seized, further fuelling Stalin’s paranoia, but most submitted to the inevitable. As Maly put it: ‘If they don’t kill me there, they will kill me here. Better to die there.’ One by one, Philby’s handlers were declared enemies of the people. Philby knew they were nothing of the sort. He had revered them for their ‘infinite patience’ and ‘intelligent understanding’, their ‘painstaking advice, admonition and encouragement’. But in later life, he expressed little sadness over the murder of these ‘marvellous men’, and offered no criticism of the tyranny that killed them. Only the politics mattered.
By 1939, however, politics was becoming extremely complicated. In August the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact. Philby had become a Soviet agent in order to fight fascism; under the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, communism and fascism were now effectively in alliance. For the first and only time in his life, Philby seems to have experienced an ideological wobble: ‘What’s going to happen to the single-front struggle against fascism now?’ he asked his new Soviet controller. The relationship cooled markedly. Philby complained that he was not receiving sufficient political instruction. The replacement case officer did not know him, and may not have trusted him. For a time contact was broken off, for reasons that still remain obscure.
That same year, the head of MI5 blandly declared that Soviet ‘activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion’. He could not have been more wrong, for the Soviet network in Britain was not only far more substantial than anything Germany could muster, but also developing new tactics, and encouraging its spies to seek positions within British intelligence itself, where they would have access to secrets of the greatest importance. Anthony Blunt would soon join MI5. Burgess had talked his way into MI6, known as ‘The Hotel’ in Soviet spy code, and helped to haul in Philby after him. ‘I had been told in pressing terms by my Soviet friends that my first priority must be the British secret service,’ Philby wrote. Obediently, he began putting out feelers.
The coolness between Philby and his Soviet handlers was short-lived. In the spring of 1940, The Times sent its star correspondent to France to join the British Expeditionary Force as the paper’s accredited war correspondent. Philby had already memorised elaborate instructions for contacting Soviet intelligence in Paris. He should stand near the Thomas Cook office in Place de la Madeleine with a copy of the Daily Mail; the Soviet contact would be carrying a copy of the same newspaper. Philby would ask him: ‘Where is the Café Henri round here?’ The man would reply: ‘It’s near the Place de la République.’ Having performed this mini-drama, Philby passed on information he had gathered in the course of his reporting, about British military strength and weaponry, as well as French forces behind the Maginot Line – information of great interest to Moscow, and of even greater interest to Berlin. But whatever qualms he may have felt about the Nazi–Soviet pact seem to have evaporated. Returning to London after the retreat, he hastened to contact Maclean, saying he had brought back ‘extraordinarily valuable materials’ which he wanted to pass to ‘the appropriate hands’. Philby’s loyalties were unchanged, his determination undimmed, and his hints about wanting to join the secret services already bearing fruit, in the shape of Hester Marsden-Smedley.
This, then, was the man who met and befriended Elliott in 1940, a two-sided man who used one side to disguise the other. Nick Elliott loved and admired Philby, the upper-crust, Cambridge-educated bon viveur; the charming, happily married, conservative clubman; the battle-scarred war correspondent now playing a vital part in the thrilling world of espionage. Elliott had no inkling of the other Philby, the veteran communist spy, and it would be many more years before he finally met him.