Nicholas Elliott called often: his conversations with both Philby and Aileen were carefully logged and transcribed. One of these, intercepted in August, sent a sharp jolt of alarm through MI5, when Aileen was overheard telling Elliott that Philby had gone sailing with a friend, a City businessman with a yacht moored in Chichester on the south coast. ‘I suppose he is not doing a “dis”?’ Aileen asked Elliott, apparently fearful that her husband might use the boat trip to stage a ‘disappearing act’, like Burgess and Maclean, and slip over to France. Elliott laughingly reassured her that there was no danger whatever of Philby defecting.
Guy Liddell pondered whether to intercept the sailing party, but concluded that Aileen had only been speaking ‘in jest’. In any case, ‘it was already too late to stop Philby getting onto the yacht and it seemed equally unjustifiable to issue any warning to the French’. Philby returned home that evening, oblivious to the flap he had caused. But as the evidence mounted, so did MI5’s fear that Philby might be planning to make a run for it. In December, the hunters attacked again.
*
The trees were bare beside the road into London, as Philby drove south in answer to another summons from C. The inquiry was entering a new season. ‘The case against Philby seems somewhat blacker,’ wrote Liddell. As Philby headed towards the office, he imagined that MI5 must have found more evidence, and that the next few hours might be ‘sticky’. He was right on both counts. Menzies explained apologetically that a ‘judicial inquiry’ had now been launched into the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Would Philby mind terribly going to MI5 headquarters to answer some more questions? It was an order disguised as an invitation. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had personally approved the decision to bring Philby in for questioning again. Philby’s apprehensions were fully realised when he was ushered into a fifth-floor office of Leconfield House, to find a familiar, hefty and distinctly alarming figure awaiting him.
‘Hello Buster,’ said Philby.
Helenus Patrick Joseph Milmo, universally known as ‘Buster’, was a barrister of the old school, aggressive, precise, pompous and ruthless. He had not come by his nickname lightly. He liked to flatten his opponents with a barrage of accusation, delivered in a booming baritone with an air of legal omniscience. Philby had witnessed these demolition tactics at first hand during the war when, as MI5’s legal adviser, Buster Milmo had joined him in breaking down suspected spies held at Camp 020, the secret interrogation centre in Richmond. After the war, Milmo played a starring role for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. He would go on to become a High Court judge. Armed with MI5’s dossier, Milmo intended to break Philby and coerce him, by sheer force of argument, into a confession.
Philby sat down and, partly to cover his nerves, took out his pipe and lit it. Milmo instantly told him to put it out, with a sharp reminder that this was a formal judicial inquiry, equivalent to a court of law. This was untrue: the interview had no legal standing, but the exchange set the tone for what followed. Milmo came out with all guns blazing. He accused Philby of spying for the Soviets since the 1930s, sending hundreds to their deaths, betraying Volkov, and tipping off Burgess and Maclean. Philby parried, deflecting and ducking. Milmo then fired his best shot: he revealed that the volume of radio traffic between London and Moscow had jumped dramatically after Volkov’s offer to defect, suggesting a tip-off to Moscow Centre, followed by a similar leap in traffic between Moscow and Istanbul. How did Philby account for this?
Philby shrugged. ‘How would I know?’
Milmo moved on to Krivitsky’s report of the mysterious Soviet spy sent under journalistic cover to Civil War Spain with a mission to assassinate Franco.
‘Who was that young journalist?’ Milmo demanded. ‘Was it you?’
Philby replied that if the Soviets had really wanted to kill Franco, they would surely have used a professional hitman, not a Cambridge graduate who had never fired a gun. Frustrated, Milmo now overplayed his hand, accusing Philby of handing sensitive papers to Burgess, a charge Philby could refute without even lying.
Milmo next accused Philby of marrying a communist, and smuggling her into Britain. Philby countered that if he had left his Jewish girlfriend in Vienna she would have wound up in a Nazi concentration camp. ‘How could I not help her?’
The lawyer was running out of ammunition. At each evasion, Milmo’s voice grew louder, his face redder, his manner more bellicose. He banged the table. He snorted in disbelief. He flapped and thrashed.
A stenographer took down every word. In the next room, a posse of senior intelligence officers, including Dick White, Guy Liddell and Stewart Menzies, listened glumly as Milmo grew more enraged, and more ineffectual. ‘So far, he has admitted nothing,’ Liddell recorded in his diary. ‘Milmo is bearing down on him pretty heavily.’
‘It all became a shouting match,’ said White.
After four hours Milmo was hoarse, Philby was exhausted, and the interrogation had ended in stalemate. Milmo knew Philby was guilty. Philby knew he knew, but he also knew that without a confession, the accusations were legally toothless. ‘The interrogation of Philby has been completed without admission,’ wrote Liddell that evening, ‘although Milmo is firmly of the opinion that he is or has been a Russian agent, and that he was responsible for the leakage about Maclean and Burgess.’ Before leaving MI5 headquarters, Philby was asked to surrender his passport, which he happily did, reflecting that if he needed to flee he would be travelling on false papers provided by his Soviet friends.
‘I find myself unable to avoid the conclusion that Philby is and has been for many years a Soviet agent,’ Milmo wrote. To White he was even blunter. ‘There’s no hope of a confession, but he’s as guilty as hell.’ Reviewing the tapes and the transcript of the Milmo interview, Guy Liddell conceded that Philby, his esteemed former colleague and friend, had failed to behave like a man unjustly accused. ‘Philby’s attitude throughout was quite extraordinary. He never made any violent protestation of innocence, nor did he make any attempt to prove his case.’ But without new, firm evidence, Liddell wrote, Philby ‘had all the cards in his hands’. And if Philby was guilty, what of the other friends they shared? What of his good friend Anthony Blunt, who had known both Burgess and Philby? What of Tomás Harris, another former MI5 man, whose home had been the scene of so many well-oiled get-togethers? Fissures of doubt began to creep through the intelligence establishment, as its senior figures eyed one another, and wondered.
Philby described his four-hour grilling to Elliott, angrily insisting that he had been lured into a legal trap. Outraged on his friend’s behalf, Elliott complained to Malcolm Cumming, a senior MI5 officer and one of the few Etonians in the Security Service.
Nicholas Elliott again referred to PEACH’s intense anger with MI5 over the Milmo interrogation. He said that PEACH did not in any way object to such an independent interrogation being carried out but he did resent the fact that after his friendly conversations with Dick White, he should be virtually enticed to London under false pretences and then thrown straight into what proved to be a formal inquiry at which even his request to smoke was refused.
As Philby’s advocate, Elliott was determined to extract an apology for the way the interrogation had been handled. MI6 was ‘counter-attacking’, Liddell recorded gloomily, and Elliott was leading the charge.
MI5 was still determined to extract an admission of guilt from Philby, and now turned to a man who was, in almost every conceivable way, the polar opposite of Buster Milmo. William ‘Jim’ Skardon, a former detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police, was Watcher-in-Chief, head of the surveillance section A4, and by repute the ‘foremost exponent in the country’ in the art of interrogation. Skardon was mild and unassuming in manner; he wore a trilby, a raincoat, an apologetic expression and a damp moustache. He spoke in a sibilant, self-effacing whisper, and seldom made eye contact. Where Milmo relied on intimidation and noise, Skardon wormed his way into a man’s mind by guile and insinuation. He had successfully extracted a confession in January 1950 from Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy, winning his confidence during long walks in the country and quiet chats in rural pubs. Skardon uncovered truth by increments, asking what seemed to be the same questions, subtly varied, again and again, until his target tripped and became enmeshed in his own lies. Philby knew a great deal about Skardon, and his reputation. So when this stooped, unctuous, bland-seeming man knocked on his door in Heronsgate and asked if he might come in for a cup of tea, Philby knew he was still in the deepest water.