Kim Philby (7 page)

I finally landed a job on the last day of 1934 as a copywriter at S. H. Benson Ltd,
⁹
one of the largest advertising agencies in England. Kim had meanwhile made his entry into journalism with a job on the
Review of Reviews.
We both began at £4 a week. I went up to £5 after two months; I never heard whether or when Kim got a rise.

But by this time, it seems, he had more important things on his mind.

Notes

1
. Now part of District VII in Budapest.

2
. Elizabeth Monroe,
Philby of Arabia
, Faber, London, 1973.

3
. An English classical scholar and academic, later Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra. Warden of Wadham College, Oxford 1938–70 and vice-chancellor of Oxford University 1951–54.

4
. See Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and David Leitch,
Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation
, André Deutsch, London, 1968, p. 169.

5
. Monroe,
Philby of Arabia.

6
. Lizy was a friend of Edith Tudor-Hart, née Suschitzky, an Austrian-British photographer and an ardent communist. Tudor-Hart introduced Philby to Arnold Deutsch, who would act as the first Soviet controller of the Cambridge spies. Philby in turn recommended that Deutsch approach seven potential agents, including Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.

7
. According to his entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography,
Gedye, who helped Philby in Vienna, was ‘the greatest British correspondent of the inter-war years’. Gedye was extremely prescient in his views about the reasons for the rise of the Nazis. The great mistake made by the Allies, in his view, was not to give more support to the moderate German Social Democratic government which came to power at the end of the First World War, after the Kaiser abdicated and German sailors and soldiers mutinied, creating revolutionary conditions in many parts of the country. By imposing harsh conditions in the Treaty of Versailles, supporting separatist movements in the Rhineland and taking advantage of their superior military power in the occupied areas to rule by force, rather than in strict accordance with the law, the Allies fatally weakened the moderate Social Democratic government, set the example of rule by force and paved the way for a revival of nationalism which was to lead to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. According to Gedye, ‘Fascism, Hitlerism, dreamers of revanche and of a new-born militarism – those are the plants which the Allies nurtured in German soil. Democracy, pacifism, international understanding – those are the plants, which springing up after the Revolution, found themselves faced with the withering lack of sympathy and encouragement from the victorious Allies, who had it in their power for several vital years to encourage their growth by moderation and understanding. All the world knows today that British and American statesmanship at Paris [during the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Versailles] tried to stand out for more reasonable treatment for Germany, but was out-manoeuvred by the implacable determination of France to be revenged on her enemy and to push the disruption of the German State to the extreme limit. Month after month we watched the spontaneous efforts of the German people … to secure and consolidate the ground which had been won for democracy being foiled by Allied severity and distrust.’ (G. E. R. Gedye,
The Revolver Republic: France’s Bid for the Rhine
, Arrowsmith, London, 1930.)

8
. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville,
Philby: The Long Road to Moscow
, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973.

9
. Founded in 1893, the largest and most prestigious British advertising agency pre-war, and famous for creating the ‘Guinness is good for you’ campaign. When Milne joined the company, the copywriting team was known as the ‘Literary Department’. In 1971, Benson’s, by then a publicly listed company, was acquired by Ogilvy & Mather, becoming Ogilvy, Benson & Mather in the UK. Within a decade the ‘Benson’ name had been quietly dropped.

†
Editor’s note:
‘The Day of Potsdam’ was the ceremony celebrating the opening of the Reichstag after Adolf Hitler came to power. Hitler chose 21 March for the ceremony because it was on that date, sixty-two years earlier, that Otto von Bismarck had convened the Reichstag of the ‘Second Reich’. The date in 1933 signifies the start of the ‘Third Reich’.

†
Editor’s note:
Broadly translated as ‘forcible coordination’ or ‘bringing into line’, this was the Nazi term for the process by which the regime successively sought to establish a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German life and society. Among the goals of this policy was bringing about adherence to the regime’s specific Nazi doctrine.

3

CHANGE OF LIFE

F
or the next few years, up to October 1941, I was somewhat less involved with Kim than I had been before or was to become later. My job, marriage, the war and many other interests dominated my life. Kim for his part was out of England for much of the time from early 1937 onwards. The period has been covered in detail in the Philby literature, and I do not intend to go over the same ground at second hand. All I can contribute on this obviously crucial stage in Kim’s life is how it seemed to me at the time.

The accepted historical theory is that, at some point after recruitment by the Russians, Kim was instructed by them to break away from leftism and create a new persona with some sympathy for Nazism and fascism; he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, attended official German functions and visited Berlin. So much evidence has been published for the metamorphosis that I assume the theory to have some truth, and Kim himself gives support to it in the introduction to his book. Kim, however, seems to say there that the main reason was not so much the long-term one of ‘laundering’ him of the taint of leftism as the shorter-term one of establishing him as an informant on ‘overt and covert links between Britain and Germany’.

Either way, the new persona must have made very little impression on me at the time. For example, until I read about them in the
Sunday Times
articles of October 1967 I had completely forgotten about Kim’s activities in the Anglo-German Fellowship or his abortive efforts to start a German-financed trade journal. This is all the odder since, as I am now reminded, my own sister Angela actually assisted Kim for a time on the trade journal. She says that once they had prepared the material for the first number, which never appeared, there was little office work to be done; she and Kim spent much of their day doing crosswords and the like.

Kim’s political standpoint certainly seemed to be undergoing some change. He no longer expressed strong leftist views and was now more often on the fence. I assumed he was beginning to come to terms with the real world. I could understand this as I was working in a citadel of private enterprise myself, and greatly enjoying the experience. But I never thought of him as turning even slightly pro-Nazi or pro-fascist. He was strongly anti-Mussolini at the time of the Abyssinian invasion of autumn 1935 and strongly against the subsequent Hoare–Laval pact. I cannot remember what he may have said about Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936, but if there had been a word in favour it would have made a strong impression. I recall that he was anti-Baldwin and pro-Edward at the time of the Abdication, but this was clearly from hostility to the Baldwin government and the Establishment attitude, and nothing to do with Edward VIII’s alleged pro-Nazi leanings.

It has been suggested that Kim had to tone down his prescribed change of views when speaking to old friends. No doubt he realised that I would have found it very unconvincing. On the other hand, on the occasions I saw him in 1935 and 1936 there were
often other people around; if he had taken one line with me when alone and another in wider company I would certainly have noticed. I do recall his saying at this time – not in company – that, although Marx had been remarkably successful in analysing economic and political forces, he had altogether failed to foresee, or provide an explanation for, the rise of nationalism. I took this as evidence that his views on Marxism were undergoing a significant change: but perhaps it was all part of his cover plan.

One point may be worth making. There was a possibility, gradually increasing to probability as time went on, that Britain and Germany would soon be involved in a war with each other. The Russians would have been very unwise to allow Kim to become too publicly identified with German interests. Although there was no likelihood that after the outbreak of war he would, like his father, actually find himself interned, his ability to penetrate British intelligence or government might have been seriously handicapped. It obviously made sense that he should gradually obliterate his communist or Marxist past, but there was no need to go very far the other way. A measure of disillusionment with the left, and perhaps a cynicism about politics in general, would have been much more convincing, and indeed he sometimes gave this impression. If the Russians really did urge upon him a positively pro-German line, with little need for caution, is this possibly an indication that they thought the future would see Britain and Germany fighting on the same side, against the Soviet Union? My own belief is that the accounts of his ostensible switch to a pro-German position have been exaggerated.

There have been several theories about the Kim–Lizy marriage. Some say it was a marriage of convenience from the start, either to suit the Russians or to get her out of Austria.
Others say it was genuine to begin with, but was later broken up at Soviet insistence. Seeing them together, one had no reason to doubt that their marriage was as real as any other. The arrival of Lizy probably changed Kim’s lifestyle even more than a marriage usually does. He had been very much a bachelor before; as far as I know he had never even had a girlfriend. Now the atmosphere was cosy, domesticated and rather Bohemian.

Sometime in 1935 they took a flat in Kilburn, not far from his parents’ house in Acol Road. It was there that I first met Guy Burgess. He made an immediate impact – as he did, I imagine, on everyone who met him. I once nourished a theory that Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal was partly based on Guy, if one ignores Guy’s homosexuality, but the dates do not fit well. Kim and Lizy’s scruffy little dog was called Guy after him, when it wasn’t called Menelek after the later ruler of Abyssinia; the two names were used indiscriminately. An even more outrageous character who turned up once or twice at the Kilburn flat was Tom Wyllie, another homosexual and a brilliant classicist who had been at Westminster and Christ Church. He was now chiefly occupied in turning the War Office, where he lived as a resident clerk, into a centre of alcoholic orgy. When after years of patient endurance the War Office could take no more, he was transferred to the Office of Works, where the requisitions and invoices that passed across his desk provided a rich field for creating havoc among Whitehall office supplies. Like Burgess, he flaunted his homosexuality. Although Kim had known Wyllie at Westminster, I think it was probably Burgess who brought him along. Kim was amused by the stories of Wyllie’s exploits and drunkenness, but did not like him much.

Most of Kim’s and Lizy’s friends were normal and well-behaved. Lizy was a very sociable person and Kim was becoming more and
more sociable himself; the Kilburn flat was a lively place. Here I first encountered the ‘Mitteleuropa lot’. These were a number of Austrians, Czechs and Hungarians – some were recent Jewish refugees, others longer established in London – whom Lizy was gathering around her. Most if not all were left wing. They were presumably just the sort of people whose company Kim was now supposed to eschew, but at this time he certainly did not.

In February 1937, having so far made little progress in journalism, Kim went off on his freelance visit to Spain. We are now told that this was an assignment for the Soviet intelligence service, which provided the money. It seems surprising that Kim, with all his experience and that of his Soviet employers, was nearly floored by the question Dick White
¹
of MI5 put to him in 1951: who paid for the trip? One would have expected the provision of a good financial cover story to be one of the first points in the briefing given by the Russians. But at the time his decision to try his hand in Spain seemed perfectly natural. If I had thought about the financial side at all, I would have assumed that he had managed to save a little or had borrowed from or been helped by his parents. He had made plenty of previous journeys to Europe at his own expense. Travelling and living in most European countries was extremely cheap. The theory has also been advanced that it was, in the long run, a serious flaw in Kim’s ‘front’ that he did not have proper newspaper accreditation for this first Spanish visit. I cannot agree. I am sure that if he had not turned out to be a Russian spy no one would have seen anything at all unusual in his seeking his journalistic fortune in Spain. After all, the freelance trip was abundantly justified by the result: within three months he had landed a plum job with
The Times
.