A Spy Among Friends (29 page)

That is your association with Burgess?

Correct.

What about the alleged communist associations? Can you say anything about them?

The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was some time in 1934.

That implies that you have spoken to communists unknowingly and not known about it.

Well, I spoke to Burgess last in April or May, 1951.

He gave you no idea that he was a communist at all?

Never.

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 . . .

And here Philby paused, for just a beat: a man, it seemed, wrestling with his own conflicted feelings, his duty, conscience and personal loyalty, and the pain of betrayal by a dear friend.

. . . on the subject of friendship, I’d prefer to say as little as possible, because it’s very complicated.

As for Lipton, Philby invited his accuser to repeat his allegations outside the House of Commons, or else hand over whatever information he had to the proper authorities.

The press conference came to an end. Philby, ever the generous host, served the assembled journalists beer and sherry in his mother’s dining room. ‘I see you understand the habits of the press very well,’ joked an American reporter. The resulting press coverage contained no suggestion that Philby was anything other than an honest, upright government official, brought down by his friendship with a secret communist, and now definitively absolved. The Soviet intelligence officer Yuri Modin watched the press conference on the evening news, and marvelled at Philby’s ‘breathtaking’ performance: ‘Kim played his cards with consummate cunning. We concluded, just as he had, that the British government had no serious evidence against him.’

Marcus Lipton had no choice but to retreat in ignominy, formally withdrawing his accusations, which he ‘deeply regretted’.

‘My evidence was insubstantial,’ the MP admitted. ‘When it came to a showdown my legal advisers counselled me to retract.’ Philby issued a clipped and gracious statement: ‘Colonel Lipton has done the right thing. So far as I am concerned, the incident is now closed.’

Philby’s triumph was complete. Elliott was ‘overjoyed’ at Philby’s victory and the prospect of bringing him back into the firm. The Robber Barons would now actively ‘seek his reemployment by his old service’, which in turn raised the prospect, for Philby, of ‘further service to the Soviet cause’.

Elliott had rehabilitated his old friend, just as his own career was about to take a most almighty dive.

_*

In the dawn light of 19 April 1956, a peculiar figure in a rubber diving suit and flippers waddled sideways down the King’s Stairs at Portsmouth Harbour, and clambered into a waiting dinghy. The man was no more than five feet five inches tall. On his head he wore a woolly balaclava with a diving cap on top, and on his back a tank with enough oxygen for a ninety-minute dive. He was a decorated war hero, Britain’s most famous frogman, and his name was Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb.

In the distance, through the drifting mist, loomed the faint shapes of three Soviet warships, newly arrived in Britain on a goodwill mission and berthed alongside the Southern Railway Jetty. An oarsman rowed the boat out some eighty yards offshore. Crabb adjusted his air tank, picked up a new experimental camera issued by the Admiralty Research Department, and extinguished the last of the cigarettes he had smoked continuously since waking. His task was to swim underneath the Soviet cruiser
Ordzhonikidze
, explore and photograph her keel, propellers and rudder, and then return. It would be a long, cold swim, alone, in extremely cold and dirty water, with almost zero visibility at a depth of about thirty feet. The job might have daunted a much younger and healthier man. For a forty-seven-year-old, unfit, chain-smoking depressive, who had been extremely drunk a few hours earlier, it was close to suicidal.

The mission, codenamed ‘Operation Claret’, bore all the hallmarks of a Nicholas Elliott escapade: it was daring, imaginative, unconventional and completely unauthorised.

Seven months earlier, Nikita Khrushchev had announced that he would visit Britain for the first time, accompanied by his premier, Nikolai Bulganin. The First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would travel aboard the latest Russian cruiser, the
Ordzhonikidze,
escorted by two destroyers. The Soviet leader would then be taken by special train to London, and dine at Number Ten with the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. The visit was hailed by diplomats as an important thaw in the Cold War. The spies saw other opportunities.

The Soviets were rumoured to have developed a new type of propeller, as well as enhanced underwater sonar technology to evade submarines. With the arms race running at full tilt, MI6 and Naval Intelligence wanted to find out more. There was also an element of tit for tat. British warships had recently docked in Leningrad, and ‘frogmen had popped up all over the place’, in Elliott’s words. Anything the Soviets could do, MI6 could do better, and more secretly.

The intelligence services sprang into action. MI5 set about bugging the Soviet leader’s suite at Claridge’s Hotel, and installed a listening device in the telephone. The Naval Intelligence Department urged that the investigation of the undersides of the Soviet vessels be undertaken as ‘a matter of high intelligence priority’. Elliott, the London station chief for MI6, was charged with exploiting this golden opportunity for espionage. As he put it, with typical ribaldry: ‘We wanted a closer look at those Russian ladies’ bottoms.’ He knew just the man for the job.

Lionel Crabb earned his nickname from the American actor, athlete and pin-up Buster Crabbe, who had played Flash Gordon in the film series and won a gold medal for swimming at the 1932 Olympics. In almost every way, the English Buster Crabb was entirely unlike his namesake, being English, tiny, and a poor swimmer (without flippers, he could barely complete three lengths of a swimming pool). With his long nose, bright eyes and miniature frame, he might have been an aquatic garden gnome. He was, however, spectacularly brave, and supremely resilient. Born to a poor family in South London, he first served in the Merchant Navy and then joined the Royal Navy after the outbreak of war, training as a diver. In 1942 he was dispatched to Gibraltar, to take part in the escalating underwater battle around the Rock, where Italian frogmen, using manned torpedoes and limpet mines, were sinking thousands of tons of Allied shipping. Crabb and his fellow divers set out to stop them, with remarkable success, blowing up enemy divers with depth charges, intercepting torpedoes and peeling mines off the hulls of ships. When war ended, Crabb cleared mines from the ports of Venice and Livorno, and when the militant Zionist group Irgun began attacking British ships with underwater explosives, he was called in to defuse them. The risks were staggering, but Crabb survived and was duly awarded the George Medal for ‘undaunted devotion to duty’. He became, briefly, a celebrity. Small boys mobbed him, and he frequently appeared in the newspapers. Long after demobilisation, Crabb continued to do odd, secret or particularly dangerous underwater jobs for the Navy.

Elliott had got to know Crabb during the war, and considered him ‘a most engaging man of the highest integrity . . . as well as being the best frogman in the country, probably in the world’. He cut a remarkable figure in civilian life, wearing beige tweeds, a monocle and a pork pie hat, and carrying a Spanish swordstick with a silver knob carved into the shape of a crab. But there was another, darker side to this ‘kindly bantam cock’. Crabb suffered from deep depressions, and had a weakness for gambling, alcohol and barmaids. When taking a woman out to dinner he liked to dress up in his frogman outfit; unsurprisingly, this seldom had the desired effect, and his emotional life was a mess. In 1956 he was in the process of getting divorced after a marriage that had lasted only a few months. He worked, variously, as a model, undertaker and art salesman, but like many men who had seen vivid wartime action, he found peace a pallid disappointment. He was also feeling his age. When Elliott contacted him, Buster Crabb was working at Espresso Furnishings in Seymour Place, selling tables to cafés. Crabb accepted the mission without hesitation. He wanted, he said, ‘to get m’ feet wet again, get m’ gills back’. Money was not discussed. Instead, Elliott joked that if the investigation of the
Ordzhonikidze
proved successful, Crabb could be assured of ‘supplies of whisky for many years’. Others were doubtful that Crabb was up to the task. John Henry, the MI6 technical officer, pointed out that the diver seemed to be ‘heading for a heart attack’. But Elliott insisted that ‘Crabb was still the most experienced frogman in England, and totally trustworthy . . . He begged to do the job for patriotic as well as personal motives.’ Ted Davies, a former sailor who headed MI6’s naval liaison unit, was assigned as his case officer.

Operation Claret proceeded with the sort of smoothness that suggested no one in authority was paying adequate attention. Michael Williams, a Foreign Office official recently posted to oversee MI6, was handed a list of possible operations for the Soviet visit. ‘The dicey operations [are] at the beginning of the file and the safer ones at the back,’ he was told. Williams was distracted by the death of his father that morning. A short while later he handed the file back without comment. MI6 assumed this amounted to Foreign Office approval; Williams assumed someone senior to him must already have given the go-ahead; the Admiralty assumed that MI6 was responsible, since it was carrying out the mission; and MI6 assumed the Admiralty was in the driving seat, since it had asked for the information in the first place. And the Prime Minister assumed that no spies were doing anything, because that was exactly what he had ordered them to do.

Back in September, when the Khrushchev trip was first mooted, Anthony Eden stated categorically: ‘These ships are our guests and, however we think others would behave, we should take no action which involves the slightest risk of detection.’ Eden shared Macmillan’s distaste for spying, and was not about to have the adventurers of MI6 spoiling this moment of delicate international diplomacy. When Elliott was later quizzed about who had signed off on the operation, and in what capacity, his shrugging reply was most revealing. ‘We don’t have a chain of command. We work like a club.’

A week before the Soviet delegation arrived, Anthony Eden learned that plans were being hatched for underwater surveillance of the
Ordzhonikidze,
and put his foot down even more firmly. ‘I am sorry, but we cannot do anything of this kind on this occasion,’ he wrote. Elliott would later insist that the ‘operation was mounted after receiving a written assurance of the Navy’s interest and in the firm belief that government clearance had been given’. He either did not know about the Prime Minister’s veto or, more likely, didn’t care.

Kim Philby, meanwhile, was in Ireland. Immediately after the triumphant press conference, William Allen, a friend who had been press counsellor at the British embassy in Turkey, offered him a job writing a centenary history of his family firm, David Allen & Sons, a large printing and poster company. Allen was an Old Etonian, and it is possible that Elliott had a hand in arranging what was, in effect, a ‘working holiday’. Allen was also a fascist sympathiser, a close friend of Oswald Mosley and as far removed from his guest, politically, as it was possible to be. This did not stop Philby from spending several months living at Allen’s expense in the family home in County Waterford, writing a very boring book about printing, ink and paper. He returned to Britain just as Operation Claret was being uncorked. Philby knew ‘Crabbie’ well. As head of the Iberian section of Section V, he had been involved in Crabb’s wartime exploits off Gibraltar. Elliott would surely have been unable to resist telling Philby that he had brought the great frogman, their old comrade in arms, out of retirement in order to pay an underwater call on the visiting Soviet delegation.

The day before the Soviet mini flotilla was due to arrive, Buster Crabb and Ted Davies took the train to Portsmouth and checked in to the Sally Port Hotel. Davies, somewhat unimaginatively, signed in as ‘Smith’, but added ‘attached Foreign Office’; Crabb signed the hotel register in his own name. He then contacted a friend, Lieutenant George Franklin, the diving instructor from the training ship HMS
Vernon
, who had agreed, unofficially, to help him prepare for the dive and supply additional equipment. The next day Crabb watched through powerful binoculars as the Soviet warships cruised into port. Then he went on a bender. Crabb had many friends in Portsmouth, and they all wanted to buy him a drink. During his prolonged pub crawl, Crabb was heard to boast that he was being paid sixty guineas to go ‘down to take a dekko at the Russian bottoms’. The night before the dive, Crabb drank five double whiskies, with a similar number of beer ‘chasers’.

The next morning, Franklin helped him into his two-piece Pirelli diving suit, purchased from Heinke of Chichester, handed him his flippers, and adjusted the valves on his air tank. Two uniformed policemen escorted them through the docks, and down the King’s Stairs. Franklin rowed the boat, while Crabb sat smoking in the stern. At around 7 a.m., Crabb checked his gear for the last time, and slipped backwards over the gunwale with a gentle splash, leaving behind a trail of bubbles in the murky water. Twenty minutes later, he reappeared, a little breathless, and asked Franklin to attach ‘an extra pound of weight’. Then he was gone.