Kim Philby (24 page)

I arrived in Vaniköy towards the end of August, after a six-day overland journey. From Baghdad to Istanbul I took the Taurus Express, four nights and three days in a little sleeping compartment where the temperature reached 114 degrees. In fiction, the Taurus is a romantic train, full of international spies (a phrase I have never understood, indeed it is a contradiction in terms) and fabulous unattainable women, but I saw nothing more romantic or sinister than a Turkish officer in a hairnet; probably I was the nearest thing on the train to an international spy. Kim and Marie met me at Haydarpaşa. Aileen of course was still in hospital, but at Vaniköy there were Guy, Nannie Tucker, Kim’s secretary Esther, the four children and the cook-houseboy. Apart from preoccupations with the impending first-born, I remember
the next few days more for Guy than for Kim. I had met him probably a dozen times in my life, always in Kim’s company. He had never been to my home or I to his, except on one occasion when Marie and I dropped him at his flat off Bond Street after a party. Kim was plainly finding him rather a burden. A telegram arrived at the embassy from the Foreign Office, saying that owing to some rearrangement Guy was not needed back immediately and could have another week in Istanbul if he wished. Kim and Esther suppressed the telegram for a time, hoping that Guy would leave as planned, but in the end they had to let him know. He stayed his extra week.

Guy, for all his awfulness, unreliability, malicious tongue and capacity for self-destruction, could be oddly appealing. He let his weaknesses appear, something that Kim seldom did. Indeed he wore almost everything on his sleeve, his celebrity-snobbery and namedropping, his sentimentality, his homosexuality; he never seemed to bother about covering up. One evening he told the story, new to me, of the founder of SIS, Captain Smith-Cumming, who was said, when trapped after a road accident, to have amputated his own leg in order to get to his dying son: at the end Guy burst into tears, to our embarrassment more than his. That same evening the conversation, unusually, turned to basic politics. Guy was talking about the future prospects of conflicting ideologies. Kim suggested that perhaps some ‘new synthesis’ might emerge – specifically, in the context, of capitalism and communism. No doubt he and Guy were throwing a little dust in the eyes of those present.

Kim, Guy, Marie and I went for one or two countryside drives in the jeep; Guy would sit at the back singing endlessly ‘Don’t dilly-dally on the way’ and a peculiar ditty of his own invention,
‘I’m a tired old all-in wrestler, roaming round the old Black Sea’. Always there would be stories about the famous and his encounters with them. ‘If I’d had a choice’, he would say, ‘of meeting either Churchill or Stalin or Roosevelt, but only one of them, I wonder which it would have been. As it is, I’ve met Churchill…’ He was far from being a mere namedropper; he could talk interestingly, often brilliantly, about his celebrities, and indeed about many subjects. But his supposedly great intellectual gifts must, as far as I am concerned, be taken on trust: for what little it is worth, my own opinion would be that he simply did not have the essential application or staying power for intellectual achievement, even on a modest Foreign Office level. Tom Driberg
⁵
has credited him with political prescience: apparently Guy, in Moscow, tipped Harold Macmillan to succeed Anthony Eden as Prime Minister when all the experts were supposedly saying ‘Rab’ Butler. Not, I would have thought, a very long shot; and against it can be set a prophecy he made at Istanbul that Hector McNeil would be the next Prime Minister but two.

What did the Russians make of him? If Kim’s story is true that Guy had acted as courier for him in Spain in order to replenish his funds, this seems to imply that Guy was in direct touch with the Russians – or at least with a trusted agent of theirs – as early as 1937; in other words, he was not simply a subagent of Kim’s, having contact with Soviet intelligence through Kim alone. As personal assistant to McNeil and to some extent in other posts he was in a position to become an important Soviet informant in his own right. Was he so used? Or did the Russians despair of ever getting hard straight intelligence from this mercurial over-subjective contact? He must have been as great a headache to them as he was to his Foreign Office masters. There is a scene in
the film
Carry on Spying
where Kenneth Williams, as a preposterous Secret Service agent, has a meeting with the chief and his deputy. As Williams leaves the chief’s office – contriving to break the glass-panelled door in the process – the deputy speaks from a full heart: ‘If only the other side would make him a decent offer!’ In 1951 there must have been many long-suffering people in the Foreign Service and outside who breathed a sigh of relief when Guy finally accepted a decent offer from the other side – or more probably extracted it; characteristically, he seems to have invited himself.

After Aileen, Guy is the most tragic character in this whole story. Almost everything he touched turned to failure in the end. Unlike Kim he did not have the nerve for the role he was called upon to play. I wonder if some hint of this showed itself on his visit to Istanbul, and contributed to Kim’s anxiety when Guy failed to return that evening. Poor Guy: banished as it were to Siberia at the age of forty (almost literally so, for the first two or three years of his exile had to be spent in Kuibyshev).
⁶
Obviously he hated living in Russia, even in Moscow: and when Kim, his friend of thirty years, finally turned up, Guy was already dying.
⁷

Our daughter duly arrived, not without minor incident. We were in Asia, the American Hospital was in Europe. Because the ferries stopped early in the evening, Kim had arranged a fallback plan. If things started at night, we would telephone the embassy. A posse consisting of one of the embassy guards and Kim’s assistant would then make all speed by road along the European bank to a point opposite Vaniköy. There a fisherman had promised he would row them across the fast-running Bosphorus. There was no possibility, he said, of anything going wrong because he slept in his boat all year round. At midnight
on 1 September this plan had to be put into operation. The boat was a long time reaching us, and it turned out that the boatman had chosen that one night to go off on a spree. Kim’s resourceful assistant had seized the first boat he saw, and he and the embassy guard managed eventually to make landfall at Vaniköy. Kim, Marie and I piled in; Guy wanted to come but the boat was too full. Carried southwards by the current, we landed two miles from where the embassy car was waiting: more delay. Altogether we took three hours door to door and perhaps it was just as well it all turned out to be a false alarm. A week later when the real thing began, we caught the ferry like any commuter. By that time Guy had gone. We never saw him again.

It had not been a good summer for Kim. For the first time since I had known him things had begun to get him down. He was as hospitable and generous as ever, but often rather morose, more easily given to irritation, even anger. Once I came back from the hospital at six in the evening to find him almost incoherently drunk; he had caught the cook red-handed in some misdemeanour and had fired him on the spot. It is possible that during these weeks some new trouble had arisen in his secret life; Guy might have brought unwelcome information, or there may have been fears of another knowledgeable defector. But at this time his domestic troubles seemed quite enough to account for the change.

Leaving Marie and the baby to come on by air, I returned overland to Teheran: three nights in a Turkish sleeper to Erzurum, then by road with a friend who had brought his car from Tabriz. We passed below Ararat, which with its lesser partner dominates the surrounding countryside as does Fuji in Japan. This was one of Kim’s favourite parts of Turkey. Though I preferred in general
the more uncompromising terrain of northern Persia, I had to concede him Ararat. I would like to have travelled with him in eastern Turkey, or for that matter in Persia, but it was not to be.

I saw Kim only once in the next three years. In the late summer of 1949 he was selected for the exacting post of SIS representative in Washington, with responsibility for liaison with CIA and FBI headquarters. It was an important upward step in his career. His period of preparatory briefing in London partly coincided with my own home leave from Teheran, and we ran into one another in Head Office. He took me off for lunch at Mrs Alleyne’s flat in Cadogan Gardens, where the family were staying. Soon afterwards he left for America and for the time being passed out of my life. I had no direct news of him after returning to Teheran, and the only item that reached me indirectly was that Guy had also been posted to Washington and was believed to be staying with Kim.

Early in June 1951, some three months before I was due to be posted home – Marie and my daughter had already flown back – I was having a drink at the house of some embassy friends. They happened to turn on the BBC short-wave news. Reception was poor, but through the crackles we caught a few words of an announcement about two missing Foreign Office officials. The name of Guy Burgess came through, though Maclean’s was lost. So unaware was I of possible implications that I was merely intrigued and rather amused; I thought he’d turn up under a table in Paris or somewhere. As the days went on I learnt a little more from
The Times
but not much. Telegrams from the Foreign Office gave news of possible sightings: one such had them on their way to Turkey or Persia. Once all this had died down, I thought little of the matter. It had not crossed my mind that
Kim might be seriously involved. In the Teheran embassy we too were caught up in a crisis of a different kind: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had been nationalised, the Prime Minister had been murdered, Mohammed Musaddiq had taken his place, and there were riots and anti-British demonstrations.

An old friend of mine, Robin Zaehner,
⁸
who had worked in Teheran for SOE during the war and usually turned up there when anything interesting was happening, arrived in July. His first words to me were, ‘Your friend Kim Philby’s in trouble.’ I was surprised and asked why. ‘Well, Burgess was a friend of his and was actually staying with him.’ This did not strike me as an adequate reason, but Zaehner had no other information, and I soon put it out of my mind. It was not until September, on my way back to England, that I heard things were serious. Finally in Rome I learnt that Kim had resigned. Even then the general office belief was that he’d had to go simply to preserve good relations with the Americans. It was said that CIA and FBI officials had been displeased to find, when they came along to Kim’s house for a confidential chat, that Guy always seemed to be around. It was also alleged that Kim had more than once caused embarrassment by being drunk on semi-official occasions. I think now that people were trying to find excuses for what was still unbelievable. There were very few people in the service who had inspired so much trust and respect as Kim, and so much affection among those who had worked closely with him. It seemed impossible that he had done anything worse than act a little unwisely.

I finally arrived back in London in October, after staying with friends and relatives in Istanbul, Athens and Geneva as well as Rome. No one had asked me to speed my journey, although my
friendship with Kim was very well known. Not indeed that I would have had any very important information to give even if I had been summoned home at once. By the time I reached London his politics at Cambridge and many other matters must have been gone over in the greatest detail.

Soon after we arrived, Marie and I had dinner with Kim and Aileen at the home of mutual friends. It was the first time we had seen him for two years. As he came in he grinned at me half-sheepishly, half-naughtily; I was reminded of Churchill’s words, ‘I’ve been in rather a scrape’. He obviously did not want to talk about what had happened, and I did not try to probe. I had the impression that he felt deeply humiliated. Nor did I learn much more from my office colleagues. Most were reluctant to talk about the affair, already several months old, or about Kim himself: he had become largely an unperson. As an old friend I felt somewhat inhibited about asking questions. But it was comforting to find that at least there did not appear to be a witch-hunt against everyone who had known him well; and my work was unaffected.

As it happened I spent very little time in England. In Rome I had been told that before I took up my expected London job I was to spend a few months in Germany. We had time to go out to Hertfordshire to see the house at Rickmansworth that Kim and Aileen had rented but were not yet living in, and help them pull down some of the obscuring ivy and other lush growth. But in truth Kim was now in the wilderness, and was to remain there for the next five years.

Notes

1
. A Scottish Labour politician and junior minister of state at the Foreign Office. Burgess was his private secretary before the Washington posting.

2
. The British Expeditionary Force in France, evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.

3
. Officer of the Legion of Merit, an award for ‘exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievement’. Only awarded to those in uniform.

4
. The book, published by Macmillan in 1937, recounts the voyage Robert Byron undertook in the company of the author Christopher Sykes between August 1933 and July 1934 to the legendary Oxiana, the region surrounding the Amu River, whose flow effectively delineates the northern border of Afghanistan with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Their adventurous expedition took them across Palestine (Israel and Lebanon today), Syria, Iraq, Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan, to end in British-ruled Pakistan.