Kim Philby (25 page)

5
. Tom Driberg (later Baron Bradwell of Bradwell) was a British journalist, politician and member of Parliament for twenty-eight years. An open communist for twenty years and a close friend of Guy Burgess, he was later to visit him in Moscow, after which he wrote the book
Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background
, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1956.

6
. Renamed Samara in 1991.

7
. Although Philby arrived in Moscow in late January 1963, he did not get to meet Burgess before the latter’s death on 30 August that year in a Moscow hospital. As Philby related to Phillip Knightley in Moscow in 1988, ‘They kept us apart when I arrived, to avoid recriminations. I didn’t get to see him before he died.’ (Quoted in Phillip Knightley,
Philby: The Life and Views of the KGB Masterspy
, André Deutsch, London, 1988, p. 223.)

8
. An intelligence officer with an exceptional knowledge of Iran, and a noted linguist and scholar. He was elected Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University and a fellow of All Souls.

9

OVER AND OUT

M
ost people go through a bad patch or two in their lives, but the ordeal Kim now went through was of a different order. His world seemed to have collapsed about him. The brilliant career, the high hopes had vanished and he was now an outcast, under serious suspicion. Aileen told Marie later that for several weeks their Rickmansworth house, The Sun Box, was under surveillance by a team of workmen not very convincingly engaged in digging up the road. Perhaps so, or perhaps they were simply rather lazy workmen; once you think you are being watched or followed everything becomes sinister. Kim, according to Aileen, was in a state almost of shock, and hated to be left alone; at the same time he would not stir from the house if he could help it.

This was the period of the main MI5 interrogation, that is to say the ‘judicial inquiry’ of November 1951 conducted by H. P. Milmo, previously of MI5 and by this time a KC, and the subsequent sessions Kim had with the expert interrogator Jim Skardon. In Germany I heard little of what went on except for one or two scraps, not necessarily reliable. It was said for instance that when Kim tried to light a cigarette Milmo snatched it angrily from his mouth and hurled it to the floor. I also heard – this may have come later from Aileen – that Kim was personally distressed by
having to face interrogation at the hands of old MI5 colleagues like Dick White and Milmo who had once thought so highly of him. It may seem strange that the attitude of SIS and MI5 friends should have mattered so much to him, but I am sure that one part of Kim was fully and genuinely involved in his SIS life, and as much interested in his work and in the company and good opinion of his colleagues as any other SIS officer. I do not think this is necessarily true of any spy in Kim’s position; for instance I doubt if it altogether applies to George Blake, although as I never knew Blake well – or at all outside the office – this is only an impression.

By the time Marie and I came back to England in August 1952 Kim’s interrogation was over, with evidently inconclusive results, and the heat had been taken off. But the hopelessness remained. All official or semi-official jobs were, of course, closed to him. It was some time before he was able to find, through Jack Ivens, a place in a trading firm, where he stayed for several months. Kim had no gift for minor commerce. It was sad to see him reduced to a dreary job which was both beneath his abilities and, in a sense, above them; like watching a Czech professor forced to sweep the streets, and not doing it very well. It may have been difficult for Kim, a natural elitist, to come to terms with humdrum uncongenial work. But I suppose he would have buckled down to it if he had had to; one now sees that he had his eyes on something else, a chance to serve the Russians again.

For the next three years, until we were posted abroad in October 1955, Marie and I saw either the whole family or Kim by himself quite frequently, usually at intervals of a few weeks at most. I had no instructions from my employers not to see him; equally, I had no instructions to see and report on him, though
Kim may possibly have wondered whether I had. Most of his old friends in SIS and other official departments thought it wiser not to know him; indeed I can remember only one other person still so employed who continued to see him at all regularly. One or two who had left, like Dick Brooman-White (by then a Conservative MP) and Jack Ivens, remained faithful. Jack and his Greek wife Nina in particular, intensely warm-hearted people whose politics were probably the opposite of Kim’s, tried to help him. Kim was very genuinely grateful – ‘They’re pure gold,’ he said. Of his and Aileen’s other friends at this time I remember especially Douglas Collins, who had founded the Goya perfume firm, and his wife Patsy, who had been a school friend of Aileen’s. But Tommy and Hilda Harris had retired to Majorca, and seldom came to England: I never saw them after about 1946.

Many people in SIS who, like me, knew very little of the case against Kim clung to the belief that he was innocent of any serious offence, although we recognised we were in no real position to judge. One important thing we did not know – and I only know it now having read
My Silent War
– was that among the evidence brought against him in the MI5 interrogation were two very sinister little items. Two days after the Volkov information reached London in 1945 there had been a ‘spectacular’ rise in the volume of NKVD telegraphic traffic between London and Moscow, followed by a parallel rise in the traffic between Moscow and Istanbul; and in September 1949, shortly after Kim had learnt that the British and Americans were investigating a suspected leakage from the British embassy in Washington some years earlier, there had been a similar rise in NKVD traffic. Kim does not say whether MI5 showed him any statistics to support these statements or merely left him to take them on trust. If
the latter, one cannot exclude that MI5 may have been bluffing a little, and exaggerating lesser rises of a kind that must have occurred frequently. But either way Kim’s reply probably helped to confirm their belief in his guilt: asked if he could explain the jumps in traffic, he replied simply that he could not. This is hardly the reaction of an innocent man. Kim’s line hitherto had been to argue that the reason why Donald Maclean had been alerted to danger was that he had observed both that he was being followed and that certain categories of secret papers had been withdrawn from him; in other words, there was no need to postulate a Third Man. But here was new and independent evidence to suggest that the Russians might have indeed been tipped off, at least about Volkov. One would have expected an innocent man, after very little thought, to have pointed out to his interrogators that, if the figures meant anything at all, then MI5 ought to be looking for someone who was still at large.

I think that if the facts about the NKVD traffic had been generally known in SIS there would have been a much greater tendency to believe Kim guilty. One also wonders to what extent those who briefed Harold Macmillan before his statement in the House of Commons in November 1955 were aware of this particular evidence, on the face of it fairly damning.

The line that Kim took after the disappearance of Maclean and Guy Burgess, as related in his book, contains a further inconsistency. Before he was summoned back from Washington, Kim had several post-mortem discussions with Geoffrey Paterson, the local MI5 representative, and Bobby Mackenzie, the embassy security officer. Kim put forward a theory of how events might have gone. Maclean, he suggested, had discovered he was under suspicion and being followed. But this would make it extremely
difficult for him to attempt any contact with the Russians, without which his chances of escape were greatly reduced. The fortuitous arrival of Burgess offered a way out, because Burgess could make the necessary arrangements through his own Soviet contact. The reason why Burgess also fled, Kim suggested, was because he was near the end of his tether and his Russian friends thought it safest to remove him from the scene. In Washington Kim stuck to this reconstruction of events, and was able to use it to good effect with the FBI. It assumed, of course, that Burgess had been a Soviet agent. Yet three pages and a few days later we find Kim back in London, telling Dick White of MI5 that it was almost inconceivable that anyone as notoriously indiscreet as Burgess could have been a secret agent of any kind, let alone a Soviet agent. If anyone ever taxed him with this inconsistency, he does not mention it.

In conversation with me – or other friends as far as I know – Kim never referred to the ordeal he had been through. Nor did he try to refute, or even mention, the evidence that had been brought against him. Only once did he discuss any part of the matter with me. One evening after he had been having supper with us he began to talk a little about Guy Burgess. Life for Guy, he said, had evidently become absolutely hopeless by 1951, and if he was indeed a Russian spy the strain on him must have been intolerable. Kim went on to say that he had been searching in his memory for any evidence which might point to the truth about Guy, and had remembered one possibly significant thing: during the war Guy had for a time assiduously sought the company of a lady of illustrious family who was working at Bletchley. Conceivably, Kim surmised, Guy had been hoping she would eventually talk indiscreetly to him about her work. Taken
somewhat aback, I asked whether he was expecting me to pass this on to the security people. ‘Why yes,’ said Kim in surprise, ‘that’s why I mentioned it.’

The more I thought of it afterwards the more puzzling I found this incident. Two things seemed absolutely obvious. First, if Guy really had been cultivating this lady’s company so busily, the fact was sure by now to be well known. Second, the reason why he had done so was much more likely to be connected with her famous name than with anything else. Guy could never resist a celebrity; as Denis Greenhill put it in a
Times
article, ‘I have never heard a name-dropper in the same class’. When I mentioned this story in the appropriate quarter it aroused no interest at all, presumably for the reasons I have suggested.

During the winter of 1952–53 we had several other evening visits from Kim at our small flat in Chancery Lane. His export–import job was in the City, not far away, and often he preferred to spend the night at his mother’s flat in Drayton Gardens rather than get back to Rickmansworth. Together we all listened to the American Presidential election results, Kim ardently supporting Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower. Another evening he insisted on cooking us a superb lobster paella, taking everything upon himself from buying and killing the lobster to finally serving up. Once he got very drunk. It so happened that we had been painting the bathroom. Kim lurched in, leant heavily on the window ledge and left a permanent impression of his hand, like the footprints of the famous in the wet cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. If by any chance some later occupant of the first-floor flat at Chancery Lane ever found that the bathroom window ledge still bore faint traces of a hand that is how it came about.

Another of his visits also had enduring results, of a very
different kind. Not long after he arrived, an old friend of Marie’s and mine from Benson days, Connie,
¹
happened to drop in. Although we had known her for sixteen years she and Kim had apparently not met before. They got on well from the start. Connie too was working in a commercial office and it seemed that she might be able to put him in the way of some business. Before she left they had arranged to meet again. Quite soon Connie’s flat in Highgate had replaced Drayton Gardens as Kim’s
pied-à-terre
in London. The affair lasted, in one degree or another, until he left for Beirut in 1956.

Kim was still spending much of his time at The Sun Box with Aileen and the five children. The marriage had been in difficulties since Istanbul and if he had not met Connie he would no doubt have met someone else. This did not alter the fact that, however unintentionally, Marie and I had been the means of introducing them, and a note of falseness had been brought into our relations with Aileen, whom we had always liked. The occasional weekends or Sundays we spent at Rickmansworth were rather sad occasions. The casual friendly take-it-or-leave-it hospitality was still there, we still had to climb into bed over kiddie-cars and collapsible paddling pools, but there was now much less to laugh at. There was also less to talk about, now that shop was ruled out. I could not discuss SIS matters with Kim – not even what was happening to his former friends in the service – and he was careful never to ask questions. For ten years, while we had been together in SIS, there had always been so much to talk about: not only the endlessly fascinating work itself, but our richly assorted colleagues and contacts and the many parts of the world that the work might take us to. The fact that we did not have very many private interests in common had not mattered.

I have read that during this period he was drinking heavily, but that was not my impression. For one thing money was too short. The dominant memory I retain of visits to the Philby family in these years is that of young children: five of theirs, one of ours and sometimes neighbourly additions. There was a permanent fairly well-behaved hullabaloo. With all their troubles, Kim and Aileen were good parents. Kim’s children meant an enormous amount to him. I have a strong feeling that, if it had not been for the five of them, he might well have been tempted to defect during this period. This would not have presented great operational difficulties. He was not debarred from travelling abroad. According to his book, he visited Madrid as a freelance journalist in 1952 (I do not remember this but I was probably still in Germany). Later, if my memory is correct, he flew to Tripoli in Libya on export–import business, and in 1954 he took Connie to Majorca to stay with Tommy and Hilda. He speaks in his book of having considered escape several times during this period, and mentions an escape plan, designed originally for America, but requiring only minor modifications to adapt it to Europe. I cannot see that much planning was necessary. He could simply have travelled on his existing British passport to some Western country having air communications with the Soviet bloc, from where, after visiting the Soviet embassy or possibly the Aeroflot office and obtaining a visa, he could have flown on to Moscow, Prague or elsewhere. All that would have needed arranging beforehand was a means of identifying himself to the embassy for what he was. Who would – or could – have stopped him at any point?