Kim Philby (23 page)

Up to the middle of 1946 I was living not far away from Kim, at a point where the Brompton and Fulham Roads join. Sometimes I would go back home with him for a drink, or Marie and I would join the two of them for a bite of supper. Once, he and I and Aileen were walking back to their house from the Cadogan Arms when Kim, in very good humour, announced that his divorce from Lizy was at last going through and he would soon be free. Then he was inspired to propose: ‘Darling, will you be the mother of my children?’ Aileen, now pregnant with their fourth, giggled all the way back to Number 18.

In the autumn of that year Kim learnt that he was being posted overseas, as head of the SIS station in Istanbul. This was part of the policy of non-specialisation: overseas experience was considered to be a necessary part of an officer’s make-up. Kim says in his book that he had already decided he could not reasonably resist a foreign posting without serious loss of standing in the service. Possibly true; but he would be much less use to the Russians abroad than he had been in London. In Istanbul
his knowledge would be confined to what his own station was doing, plus such scraps as might come his way from elsewhere, whereas in his key job in London he could probably discover without much difficulty a large part of what not only Istanbul but every other station was doing. I believe that he could have successfully resisted an overseas posting in 1946–47. He had been only two years in the anti-communist section, and most of this time had been spent on preparatory work. It would have made sense to give him another eighteen months or two years. Perhaps finance influenced him; it certainly influenced everyone else. Although the difference may not have been so great at this time as it later became, you were much better off abroad. A cynic once compiled an SIS glossary: the definition of ‘home posting’ was ‘a device calculated to reduce an officer to a state of such penury that he will readily accept a posting to ——’ (whatever was currently the most unpopular place). Kim would also have been less than human if he had not contemplated with equanimity a transfer from the rationing and shortages of London in 1946 to the pleasures and summer warmth of Istanbul.

For the last six months of that year I did not see much of him, except occasionally in the office. Marie and I had temporarily left London and rented a cottage near Goudhurst in Kent, and my journey took an hour and three-quarters each way. One Saturday evening Kim and Aileen came through on their way back to London from a visit to Sussex. I think they had been visiting Malcolm Muggeridge. They had supper with us and Kim got drunk. On this as on several other occasions I had the impression that he did so not because he had to but because he wanted to: this was a good moment to do it, with old friends. It must have been a few weeks before his and Aileen’s wedding.
Marie and I missed the occasion because we had gone on holiday to St Jean-de-Luz, of Civil War memories, and had then taken an unscheduled side trip to Madrid with two friends from Bilbao whom we had run across in St Jean.

From Goudhurst we were forced back to London in January 1947 by the coldest and fiercest winter I had known up to that time. It became impossible to make the double journey and put in a day’s work. Thus we were in time for Kim’s long-drawn-out departure from London, which lasted about a fortnight. Every night there was an impromptu farewell party at Carlyle Square; every morning, unless BOAC telephoned in time, he would leave in the frozen pre-dawn hours for London airport and wait there until cancellation was announced. But finally he got off, and not long afterwards we saw Aileen and the children onto their boat train to Glasgow at Euston.

I too by then had had my overseas posting orders, though I was not due to leave England until the end of July. My destination was the Canal Zone of Egypt, which did not greatly excite me, but there was some possibility of a transfer to Teheran after a few months. I had long been interested in Asia, and ever since I read Robert Byron’s
The Road to Oxiana
⁴
during the war, Persia had been at the top of my posting preferences. Before I left England Marie and I were able to spend a month in Spain, motoring with our Bilbao friends clockwise from Port-Bou in the north-east via Gibraltar to San Sebastian in the north-west. The car we were travelling in, a Mercedes confiscated from the
Abwehr
after the war, had been allocated to the same
FELIPE
whom we had such difficulty in identifying. On the whole, except for a few punctures in the ersatz tyres,
FELIPE
did us very well.

My job in the Canal Zone had one advantage: it required me
to visit a number of places in the Middle East. First on the list was Istanbul. I was met by Kim and Aileen at the airport and taken to their house on the water’s edge at Beylerbeyi, a village on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. Diplomats and Europeans mostly lived on the European side. It has been said that Kim must have chosen this relatively remote area in order to facilitate his contacts with the Russians. (Kim merely says that it was a beautiful place – which was true – and that he saw no reason to follow the accepted wisdom of the old hands.) However, Soviet intelligence officers were liable to be kept under surveillance by the Turkish security service, and I would have thought it easier for two Europeans to make an inconspicuous contact in crowded Pera than among the villages and rough roads of the Asiatic side. Apart from small rowing boats, the only communication between the European and Asiatic sides was by ferry boats, easily watched. However, as Kim had anyway to spend his working day in Europe, living in Asia would at least give him a wider choice of meeting places. It certainly made for pleasurable commuting. Each morning while I was there we would take one of the ferries that plied southward down the Asiatic cost and then across to Galata, and the same in reverse in the evening; one could sip raki and gaze at one of the most beautiful waterways in the world.

Kim’s predecessor in Istanbul had been Dick Brooman-White, who spent a year there after leaving Ryder Street. Dick used to enliven official correspondence with London by prefacing it with appropriate quotations. A report on an unsuccessful Balkan operation opened with an eloquent Ottoman proverb, reflecting centuries of imperial frustration: ‘All is not lost: God is not an Albanian.’ Kim, carrying on the practice, ranged widely for his quotations – German poetry, nineteenth-century Turkish
histories, once even Lenin’s ‘One step forward; two steps back’. When he put up his ‘Spyglass’ project, an ambitious operation for long-range photography across the Turkish–Soviet frontier, Dick, now at the London desk, headed the official reply:

With a ladder and some glasses

You could see to Hackney Marshes,

If it wasn’t for the houses in between.

Life with Kim and Aileen during my week in Istanbul in the late summer of 1947 seemed more relaxed and light hearted than at any time since the days at The Spinney. At the weekend the three of us went off for a camping trip into Anatolia in their rather elderly American car. We had a tent, cooking utensils, plenty of food, including (by some miscalculation) no less than forty-nine hard-boiled eggs, and of course raki, vodka, whisky and beer. In those days when nobody seemed to have accurate information about the state of the Asiatic roads you were expected to take careful notes en route of road surfaces, obstacles, bridges, culverts and so on – especially the culverts, which were considered particularly vulnerable to sabotage. As we drove, we logged culverts busily for a time. We also speculated – for by now we were well into the raki – on the possibility of encountering a bear. Kim propounded a question: which are there more of in the world, culverts or bears? It is when you come to think of it a difficult question, requiring expert knowledge in two unrelated subjects. In western Anatolia, at any rate, there was no contest: it was culverts all the way, and not a bear in sight.

This was my first encounter with Asia, a continent in which I was to spend nearly half of the next twenty years. After returning
to Egypt I flew up to Teheran for a week, and came away hoping more than ever to be posted there. But further travels were abruptly halted when Egypt was visited by one of the worst cholera epidemics of recent decades. In the next six months there were more than 20,000 deaths. Neighbouring countries would not accept travellers arriving from Egypt unless they spent several days in an isolation hospital and suffered various medical indignities. Even within Egypt movement was difficult. For a simple visit to Cairo from Ismailia you needed passes for both the car and each of its occupants, obtained forty-eight hours in advance; if you wanted subsequently to vary any of the occupants or even the car you had to start again. Marie arrived on a troopship at the end of September, after doubts had been raised whether she and others would be allowed to land. The only journey abroad I was able to make during this time was a professional but slightly irregular visit to Jerusalem at the beginning of 1948, organised by my excellent secretary, whose wide circle of brass-hat friends included the RAF senior air staff officer. I was flown in a small training plane from the RAF airfield at Ismailia to Kollundia, without passing through any immigration controls, and was thus able to see Jerusalem during the last lurid days of the British mandate.

In February 1948 Kim had occasion to visit Egypt and stayed with us in Ismailia. With the cholera epidemic much diminished but movement controls still in force, he and other visitors had to be brought in by the RAF from Habbaniya in Iraq and out again by the same route. One way or another, Kim’s week in Egypt meant an absence of nearly four weeks from Istanbul. He and a second visitor had to share a room in our far from luxurious flat. For baths we had a form of solar heating. This is to say, there was
no hot water system, but the cold water tank stood on the roof in full sun. For at least six months of the year this meant steaming hot baths from the cold (and only) bath tap, but in February it was a matter of kettles and saucepans.

Not long before Kim arrived, Marie and I had had two important items of news: we were to be posted to Teheran at the end of March, and Marie was expecting a baby at the beginning of September. From what we then knew of Teheran, it did not for all its other merits seem an ideal place to have a first child. Materially it was still very backward, with no mains water or drainage and primitive electricity. I would need to travel in Persia from time to time, leaving Marie alone. Kim suggested she should have the baby in Istanbul. There were good hospitals, and plenty of room at his house. Although he himself would be out of Istanbul some of the time, Aileen and Nannie Tucker would both be there. So it was arranged. She would fly to Istanbul at the end of June; I would follow in August and spend my annual leave there.

Kim was away in eastern Turkey when she arrived. The family had moved from Beylerbeyi to a rambling, dilapidated but attractive old house at Vaniköy, further up the Asiatic coast. Aileen’s mother, Mrs Alleyne, was staying there. Kim came back a week or so later. It had been quite an expedition: over and above their professional tasks, he, his assistant and his secretary had busily collected botanical and other samples and Kim had kept a diary. Travelling was always the happiest part of his life in Turkey. But a few days later there was a disaster. Aileen had set out alone in her car for one of Istanbul’s many summer cocktail parties; Kim either could not go or did not wish to go. Shortly afterwards she arrived at the house of nearby friends in a terrible state, badly bruised about the head and covered in dirt, and with a story of
having been held up on a narrow road and attacked by a man who hit her on the head with a rock and tried to steal her bag. She was taken to hospital. Several years later she told Marie that she had faked the incident and further that she had prolonged her stay in hospital by reinfecting her wounds. This may or may not be true. When she left the house in the car she seemed perfectly normal and cheerful. It is possible she was genuinely attacked. But the refusal of her injuries to heal over several months in hospital, and other accounts that have been published of her history of self-inflicted and self-aggravated injury, make it likely that part at least of her story to Marie was true. Her illness cast a gloom over the rest of the summer, a gloom that increasingly affected Kim.

Early in August, sometime after Aileen had been taken to hospital, and about a fortnight before I appeared, a new and turbulent visitor arrived at Vaniköy on three weeks’ leave: Guy Burgess. Kim describes the visit as professional. It is not clear whether he means professional on the British side or the Soviet, but the context suggests British. It is difficult to think of any possible benefit that could accrue to either the Foreign Service or SIS, but perhaps some gullible person in London was persuaded to approve an official journey. However professional the visit, Guy was in no way inhibited from behaving the way he usually did. He came and went as he pleased. He might be out half the night, or hanging around at home all day. If he was in, he would probably be lolling in a window seat, dirty, unshaven, wearing nothing but an inadequately fastened dressing gown. Often he would sleep there rather than go to bed. As always, he made no secret of his homosexual tastes and exploits. Guy was the masculine type of homosexual: there was nothing of the nancy boy
about him, no mincing speech or giveaway gestures. Indeed he prided himself on his masculinity. He was strongly built, a good swimmer and diver. One day – perhaps spurred on by drink but by no means drunk – he decided to dive into the Bosphorus from the second-floor balcony at Vaniköy. With no room to stand upright on the balcony rail, he fluffed his dive and hurt his back.

There was an occasion before I arrived when Guy had not returned home by about midnight and Kim began to get extremely worried: perhaps he had had a drunken fight, or had rashly tried to get off with some pretty Turkish boy already bespoken. Kim and Marie went out in the jeep to search for him, driving up and down the Asiatic side for half or three-quarters of an hour. Probably he had had an assignation with some cadet at the nearby military academy, which Kim and Marie drove past several times. But Kim’s anxiety was such that it is just conceivable the assignation was with the Russians. Guy turned up the next day with no explanation, at least none that Marie heard.