A Spy Among Friends (33 page)

Philby, in turn, was buoyed by his return to active intelligence work, and seemed to relish the confidence reposed in him by his old friend. Eleanor noticed the change in her husband’s demeanour following Elliott’s arrival: ‘I had begun to feel that Kim was bored with journalism, and that writing articles for newspapers did not wholly satisfy him. His meetings with [Elliott] were more like
real
work.’ What Philby considered his real work, of course, consisted of passing to Soviet intelligence every scrap of information he could gather, both on his travels, and from Elliott. Their relationship was running along the old tracks in more ways than Elliott knew.

Philby’s value as a Soviet agent increased in direct proportion to his activities as a British agent, and as Elliott’s informant he was privy to important information, including the identities of MI6 contacts in the region, as well as sympathetic Arab politicians and officials on the payroll. Elliott achieved a remarkable coup by being able to ‘broker a deal with the director of Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] for the exchange of intelligence on the Middle East’. Philby did not know everything that Elliott knew; but from the instructions issued by Elliott, he at least knew what MI6 wanted to know, and that, in the negative world of spying, is almost as valuable. Yuri Modin was pleased with Agent Stanley: ‘In all he served us well.’

Elliott and Philby spied, plotted and socialised together, in a family friendship that intensified over time. Eleanor and Elizabeth became as close as their husbands. At weekends the two families shared a bathing cabin named ‘Acapulco’ on Khalde beach with Colonel Alec Brodie, a much-wounded, one-eyed, pipe-smoking war veteran who was military attaché at the embassy. During school holidays, the Elliott and Philby children mixed happily together. Elliott’s teenagers, Mark and Claudia, both liked Philby, an avuncular, amusing presence. ‘He was one of the few adults to take me seriously,’ Mark Elliott recalled.

Despite the rising political tension, Beirut was still a happy playground for expatriates and tourists, a place where, in Elliott’s words, one could ‘ski in the mornings and swim in the afternoons’, and enjoy hillside picnics in between. The fun did not stop at nightfall, but extended long into the night, with an endless round of cocktails and dinners. As they had in Switzerland, the Elliotts played host to a stream of visitors. One of the earliest was Ian Fleming, who called unannounced from the airport in November 1960, and invited himself to stay. Fleming was en route to Kuwait, on a lucrative assignment from the Kuwait Oil Company to write about the country. By now a hugely successful writer, Fleming continued his freelance intelligence activities and explained to Elliott that Naval Intelligence was keen to learn more about the defences of the Iraqi port at Basra. Elliott ‘promised to look after it’. Elliott asked for a favour in return: a rare fall of rain in Kuwait had brought out a crop of delicious white truffles. Would Fleming send back a box? This was Elliott’s style of espionage: a little spying in return for truffles. That evening Fleming announced he was meeting ‘an Armenian’ in the Place des Canons; Elliott got the distinct impression that the creator of 007 had in fact ‘arranged to see a pornographic film in full colour and sound’.

As the months passed, Elliott and Philby socialised together more and more, meeting regularly ‘at parties for British diplomats and journalists’. The Elliott family photographs from the summer of 1960 are filled with images of the intermingled Philby and Elliott clans, enjoying Beirut’s beachlife and nightlife: Philby is in most pictures, in bathing trunks, T-shirt or suit, smiling, tanned, and frequently, very obviously, drunk.

Philby’s behaviour was becoming increasingly outrageous, in ways reminiscent of the antics of Guy Burgess. ‘Out of fun rather than malice,’ wrote Elliott, he ‘would make some remark well calculated to stop the conversation dead in its tracks. Such remarks served to lighten the atmosphere of a dreary party but were often the cause of severe umbrage.’ Elliott egged him on, and recalled one particularly spectacular episode of Philby devilry that ‘caused a chain reaction of offence unparalleled in my experience’. In social fallout, the Cocktail Party from Hell came close to the Dinner Party from Hell.

It was at a cocktail party given in our flat by Elizabeth and myself when my parents, then pretty elderly, had come out to stay. We had invited some forty people, including the Philbys and our ambassador, Sir Moore Crosthwaite. There was an unusual pause in the babble of conversation during which Philby was heard to remark to Moore: ‘Don’t you think Anne [the wife of a member of the embassy staff who was standing next to him] has the finest breasts in Beirut?’ Moore was undoubtedly annoyed because he thought that the breasts of the wife of a member of his staff were not an appropriate subject of conversation at a cocktail party. Anne, while doubtless justifiably proud of that part of her anatomy, was annoyed at having it discussed in public and in particular with the ambassador. Her husband was annoyed as he agreed with the ambassador that his wife’s breasts were an off-target subject for cocktail party gossip. Jane, the wife of another member of the embassy staff, was annoyed because she thought she had better breasts than Anne. Jane’s husband was annoyed possibly because he thought his wife had been slighted. Eleanor Philby was more than just annoyed because she was not particularly well endowed in that respect and comparisons are odious. And, finally, Elizabeth was annoyed because she felt the whole party was getting out of hand. In fact the only person who thought the whole episode was a huge joke was Kim Philby himself.

And Nicholas Elliott, who regaled listeners with it for the rest of his life.

Privately, Elliott worried about Philby’s alcoholic intake. He had seen Aileen drink herself into the grave. Philby’s mother Dora was drinking a bottle of gin a day by the time of her death in 1957. Elliott feared the effect Philby’s boozing might be having on his health, and on his children: ‘He had no inhibitions about getting drunk in front of them.’ Philby even trained his young son Harry to mix a ‘fierce Martini’.

Philby and Elliott both worked assiduously to cultivate Americans, particularly those involved in intelligence, of which Beirut, as a Cold War battleground, was plentifully supplied. Relations between the CIA and MI6 had come under intense strain after the Burgess and Maclean defections and the accusations against Philby, but by 1960, the relationship was back on an even keel. In some quarters of Washington, suspicion of Philby still lingered: at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover remained convinced of his guilt, as did Bill Harvey. But within the CIA, it was generally agreed that if MI6 considered him trustworthy, and Harold Macmillan had said he was innocent, then Philby must be clean. Angleton had risen to new heights in the CIA. In 1954 he was named chief of the counter-intelligence staff, a position he would retain for the next two decades. As America’s premier spy-catcher, he was becoming ‘recognised as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world’. More gaunt and aloof than ever, Angleton trusted few, and mistrusted most, inspiring a peculiar mixture of awe and fear among his colleagues. He later claimed to have rumbled Philby, but his actions clearly indicate otherwise. According to one historian, Philby was still in amicable contact with Angleton from time to time, ‘and used those opportunities to reassure his American friend of his innocence’. If the CIA had suspected Philby of being a Soviet spy, then Angleton’s operatives in Beirut would have been under instructions to avoid him, watch him and, if possible, catch him. Instead, Philby mixed freely among the throngs of American spies.

One of the most flamboyant of these was Wilbur Crane Eveland, a boisterous intelligence veteran from the West Coast, who favoured full morning dress, and arrived in Beirut at around the same time as Philby as a special agent for Allen Dulles, the CIA chief. Working independently of the CIA station, Eveland’s role appears to have been that of anti-communist paymaster in the Middle East: he bankrolled CIA efforts to overthrow the Soviet-sponsored government in Syria, provided support to the Saud dynasty in Riyadh, and propped up Lebanon’s pro-Western president, Camille Chamoun. ‘He travelled regularly to the presidential palace with his briefcase stuffed with Lebanese pounds,’ according to Richard Beeston, ‘returning late at night to the American embassy to replenish the slush fund.’ Eveland had met Philby through the Brewers (Eveland and Eleanor were both from Spokane in Washington state), and they immediately struck up a friendship. He knew Philby had links with British intelligence, and saw him as someone ‘whose brain was there to be picked’, an attitude that was entirely reciprocated by Philby. Eleanor later told the CIA that Philby had once remarked that ‘all he had to do was to have one evening with Bill Eveland in Beirut and before it was over he would know of all his operations’.

Philby established a similarly cosy relationship with Edgar J. Applewhite, the clever, sharp-suited, Yale-educated CIA station chief sent to Lebanon in 1958. Applewhite knew of the earlier suspicions surrounding Philby, but cultivated him nonetheless, at first guardedly, later wholeheartedly. The American concluded Philby was ‘much too sophisticated to give his allegiance to such a doctrinaire business as Marxism’, and besides, the Anglophile Applewhite ‘liked to talk to Philby about Arab problems’ and enjoyed the Englishman’s erudite company. The American intelligence community was, if anything, even more welcoming to Philby than the British one, for this charming, open-handed Englishman seemed trustworthy, the sort of Englishman who had helped America to win the Second World War and was now helping her to win the Cold War. ‘Philby was friendly with all the Yanks in Beirut,’ George Young later noted. ‘A lot of them babbled. He was pretty good at getting them to talk.’

One American spy talked more than any of the others, and would be drawn into the heart of the Philby-Elliott circle. Miles Copeland Jr was a drawling jazz musician from the Deep South, a wartime spy, former CIA agent and now a public relations executive and espionage fixer. The son of a doctor from Birmingham, Alabama, Copeland had spent his teenage years gambling on the riverboats, before dramatically changing tack and heading to Alabama University to study advanced mathematics. A gifted trumpeter, he played in an otherwise all-black radio band, and ended up in the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Copeland joined the OSS soon after Pearl Harbor, and headed to London with the other young Americans eager to learn the spying game. There he became a close friend of James Angleton (who left him a bequest in his will) and went on to become one of the most effective – and dubious – operatives in the CIA: he helped to organise a coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, and tried to steer his friend Colonel Nasser of Egypt away from Moscow. Copeland shared Angleton’s views of America’s role in the world, believing that the CIA had a right and a duty to steer political and economic events in the Middle East: ‘The United States had to face and define its policy in all three sectors that provided the root causes of American interests in the region: the Soviet threat, the birth of Israel, and petroleum.’ By 1956 he was living in Beirut, a partner in the industrial consultancy and PR firm Copeland and Eichelberger, no longer officially in the CIA but alert to every aspect of agency activities, with access to the daily cables passing through Applewhite’s office. So far from hiding his intelligence links, Copeland paraded them as part of his business pitch.

Copeland had ‘known and liked’ Philby since 1944 when, alongside Angleton, he had studied the art of counter-espionage under Philby’s tutelage in Ryder Street, London. Their friendship was renewed in Beirut, and Copeland would later claim to have known Philby ‘better than anyone else, excepting two or three British intelligence officers’. Elliott also relished the piratical Copeland, ‘a humorous and highly intelligent extrovert [and] a most colourful and entertaining friend’. The three families formed an intense triangular bond: Eleanor Philby, Elizabeth Elliott and Lorraine Copeland, Miles’s outspoken Scottish wife, studied archaeology in the same class at the American University in Beirut, and went on digs; their husbands plotted and drank together; their children played tennis, swam and went skiing together. The Copelands lived in a large hilltop house (known to the local Lebanese, with blunt precision, as the ‘CIA House’), which they filled with their friends and their children, one of whom, Stewart, would go on to become the drummer in the band The Police. As Beeston recalled, Copeland was the life and soul: ‘Generous, outrageous, always fun, he never took himself too seriously and had a thoroughly irreverent approach to the intelligence profession.’ He was also, in Elliott’s estimation, ‘one of the most indiscreet men I have ever met’ – which endeared him even more to Elliott and Philby, for different reasons.

Copeland was an incurable gossip and an unstoppable show-off. ‘I could trust him with any secret that had no entertainment value,’ wrote Elliott. What neither Philby nor Elliott knew was that Copeland was also a paid spy for James Angleton, their friend. As the chief of CIA counter-intelligence, Angleton maintained his own network of informers, and Copeland was one of them, though he appeared nowhere on CIA accounts. Their arrangement was simple: Copeland would forward his (very large) entertainment bills to Angleton for payment; in return, Copeland kept Angleton abreast of what was going on in Beirut.

Many years later, Copeland claimed that Angleton had specifically instructed him to ‘keep an eye on Philby’ and ‘report signs that he might be spying for the Soviets’; he even claimed to have sent a Lebanese security officer to follow Philby but found that the Englishman was ‘still practising his old tradecraft [and] invariably shook off his tail’. Like Angleton’s later assertions, Copeland’s claim to have monitored Philby at Angleton’s behest is almost certainly untrue. He was a practised fabulist, given to ‘entertaining and colourful invention’, in Elliott’s words. If he had really put Philby under surveillance, then he would easily have caught him. But he didn’t, for the very obvious (and very embarrassing) reason that he did not believe Philby
was
a Soviet spy, and neither did Angleton.