Had Nick Elliott examined the report about Section V written by his best friend, he would have been amazed, and then mortified. One passage read: ‘MR NICHOLAS ELLIOTT. 24, 5ft 9in. Brown hair, prominent lips, black glasses, ugly and rather pig-like to look at. Good brain, good sense of humour. Likes a drink but was recently very ill and now, as a consequence, drinks little. He is in charge of Holland . . .’
Elliott would have been still more astonished to discover that the man hurrying away into the night with the bundle of papers was an officer of the NKVD, Stalin’s intelligence agency, and that his friend Kim Philby was an experienced Soviet spy of eight years’ standing, codenamed ‘Sonny’.
See Notes on Chapter 2
3
Otto and Sonny
Philby’s father nicknamed his son Kim after the eponymous hero in the popular Rudyard Kipling novel. Brought up by an Indian nanny, Philby’s first language was a sort of nursery Punjabi; like Kipling’s Kim, he was a white child who could pass for an Indian. The name stuck forever, but its aptness would not emerge for years. The fictional Kim has two distinct personalities; he is a two-sided man.
Something I owe to the soil that grew
More to the life that fed,
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.
The soil that grew Kim Philby had produced a conventional upper-class, public school-educated Englishman; the life that fed him had created something entirely different, and it was a life that his dear friend Nicholas Elliott knew nothing about. He did not know that Philby had become a Soviet agent in the very year that Elliott had gone up to Cambridge; he did not know that Philby’s idyllic marriage was a fraud, and that his friend was really married to an Austrian communist spy; he did not know that Philby had joined MI6, not as an eager patriot like himself, but rather, in Philby’s own words, as a ‘penetration agent working in the Soviet interest’. And he did not know that during the convivial Sunday lunches in St Albans, the boozy evenings at the Harris home, the drinks in the basement of MI6 and the bar at White’s, Philby was hard at work, absorbing his friends’ secrets as fast as the gin, and then passing them all to Moscow.
The seeds of Philby’s double life lay in his childhood, his father, his upbringing and the intense ideological conversion that shaped him in early adulthood. Philby maintained that his dual existence emerged from an unwavering belief in a set of political principles that he discovered at the age of eighteen, and never abandoned: what Philby’s enemies described as betrayal, he saw as loyalty. But there was more to Philby than mere ideology. Like many late-Empire products of the establishment, he had an inborn faith in his ability, and right, to change and rule the world. This he shared with Elliott, though their views of how the world should be run could not have been more opposed. Both were imperialists, but for rival empires. Beneath Philby’s golden charm lay a thick substratum of conceit; the charmer invites you into his world, though never too far, and only on his terms. The English love their secrets, the knowledge that they know a little more than the man standing next to them; when that man is also a secret-keeper, its redoubles what Trevor-Roper called ‘the exquisite relish of ruthless, treacherous, private power’. Philby tasted the powerful drug of deception as a youth, and remained addicted to infidelity for the rest of his life.
Kim was his father’s pet, and project. Like Claude Elliott, St John Philby was ambitious for his son, but showed him little affection. He moulded him for Westminster and Cambridge, and was proud when his son achieved those goals; but mostly he was absent, charging around the Arab world courting controversy, and searching for celebrity. ‘My ambition is fame, whatever that may mean,’ he said. St John Philby was a notable scholar, linguist and ornithologist, and he did achieve fame of a sort, but might have found more lasting appreciation had he not been so profoundly irritating, wilful and arrogant. He was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth: he never backed down, or listened, or compromised. He was equally swift to give and take offence, and ferociously critical of everyone except himself. He alternately neglected and hectored his wife Dora. He was snobbish, and in many ways conventional, but also instinctively contrarian, forever bucking the system and then complaining furiously when the system failed to reward him. Kim idolised him, and loathed him.
At school, the young Philby was ‘constantly aware of his father’s long shadow’. Alongside his fine academic record, and general popularity, the boy showed a small streak of mendacity, prompting some parental disquiet: ‘He should always be careful to be truthful whatever the consequences,’ observed his father. Kim arrived at Cambridge at the age of seventeen on a history scholarship, having inherited both his father’s intellectual self-confidence, and his determination to swim against the tide.
The violent ideological currents sweeping Cambridge in the 1930s had created a vortex which quickly swept up Philby and many other clever, angry, alienated young men. He made friends on the political left, and some on the extreme left. Fascism was on the march in Europe, and only communism, it seemed to many, could oppose it. Late at night, over copious drinks, in panelled rooms, students argued, debated, tried on one ideological outfit or another, and, in a small handful of cases, embraced violent revolution. The most significant, and certainly the most colourful, of Philby’s radical new friends was Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, amoral, witty, supremely dangerous and loud in his advocacy of communism. Another was Donald Maclean, a clever young linguist destined for the Foreign Office.
Philby joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society. He canvassed on behalf of the Labour Party. But there was no ‘sudden conversion’, no revolutionary epiphany when the religion of communism seized his soul. Instead, the student Philby moved slowly leftwards, and then faster after visiting Berlin in 1933 and witnessing at first hand, like Elliott, the brutality of Nazism during an anti-Jewish rally. Unlike many of his friends, Philby never joined the Communist Party. His beliefs were radical, but simple: the rich had exploited the poor for too long; the only bulwark against fascism was Soviet communism, ‘the inner fortress of the world movement’; capitalism was doomed and crumbling; the British establishment was poisoned by Nazi leanings. ‘I left the university,’ he wrote, ‘with the conviction that my life must be devoted to communism.’ Yet he wore his convictions so lightly they were all but invisible. With the £14 he was awarded for his degree, he bought the collected works of Karl Marx. But there is no evidence he ever studied them in depth, or even read them. Though politics would dictate his life, he was not greatly interested in political theory. As Elliott later observed, ‘I can hardly see him as a lecturer in dialectical materialism.’
Before leaving Cambridge, Philby sought out his supervisor, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and asked him how best he might ‘devote his life to the communist cause’. It was a measure of how deeply Marxism had penetrated the university that Philby felt no danger in asking such a loaded question, and Dobb had no qualms in answering it. Dobb directed him to Louis Gibarti, a Paris agent of the Comintern, the international communist organisation, who in turn furnished an introduction to the Austrian communist underground. It was that easy: the radical left had its own Old Boy network.