As both men sucked on their pipes, Skardon seemed to wander, rather vaguely, from one subject to another, with a ‘manner verging on the exquisite’. Afterwards, Philby thought he had spotted, and side-stepped, ‘two little traps’, but wondered anxiously if there had been others he had failed to detect. ‘Nothing could have been more flattering than the cosy warmth of his interest in my views and actions.’ Skardon reported back to Guy Liddell that his mind ‘remained open’ on the issue of Philby’s guilt. This was the first of several visits Skardon would pay to Kim Philby over the coming months, as he probed and prodded, humble, polite, ingenious and relentless. Then, in January 1952, as abruptly as they had started, Skardon’s interviews ceased, leaving Philby ‘hanging’, wondering just how much the detective had detected. ‘I would have given a great deal to have glimpsed his summing up,’ he wrote. In fact, Skardon’s final report proved that the Philby charm had outlasted Skardon’s bogus bonhomie. The interrogator admitted that the hours with Philby had left him with ‘a much more favourable impression than I would have expected’. The charges against Philby were ‘unproven’, Skardon concluded. His passport was returned.
‘Investigation will continue and one day final proof of guilt . . . may be obtained,’ MI5 reported. ‘For all practical purposes it should be assumed that Philby was a Soviet spy throughout his service with SIS.’ MI6 sharply disagreed: ‘We feel that the case against Philby is not proven, and moreover is capable of a less sinister interpretation than is implied by the bare evidence.’ And that is how the strange case of Kim Philby remained, for months, and then years, a bubbling unsolved mystery, still entirely unknown to the public, but the source of poisonous discord between the intelligence services. Philby was left in limbo, suspended between the suspicions of his detractors and the loyalty of his friends. Most of the senior officers in MI5 were now convinced that he was guilty, but could not prove it; most of his former colleagues in MI6 remained equally certain of his innocence, but were again unable to find the evidence to exonerate him. There were some in MI5, like Guy Liddell, who clung to the hope that it might all turn out to be a ghastly mistake, and that Philby would eventually be cleared of suspicion; just as there were some in MI6 who harboured doubts about their former colleague, albeit silently, for the sake of the service.
But among those convinced of Philby’s guilt was one who knew him better than anyone else, and who was finding it ever harder to remain silent; and that was his wife.
See Notes on Chapter 11
12
The Robber Barons
When did Aileen Philby, the former store detective, uncover the clues that proved her husband, the Foreign Office high-flier, the doting father, the establishment paragon, was a Soviet spy? Was it when he was summoned home, and lost his job? Or did the appalling realisation come earlier? Did she always suspect there was something fishy about Guy Burgess, her bête noir, who trailed after her husband first to Istanbul, and then Washington? Did the penny drop after Philby locked himself in the basement the day after Burgess’s defection, and then drove away with a mysterious bundle and the garden trowel? Or did doubt dawn earlier still, when Philby refused to divorce his first wife, an Austrian communist?
By 1952, Aileen knew that her husband had lied to her, consistently and coldly, from the moment they first met, and throughout their marriage. The knowledge of his duplicity tipped her into a psychological abyss from which she would never fully emerge. She confronted Kim, who denied everything. The ensuing row, far from dissipating her fears, merely confirmed her conviction that he was lying. To others, she began to hint obliquely at her inner turmoiclass="underline" ‘To whom should a wife’s allegiance belong?’ she asked a friend. ‘Her country or her husband?’ Questioned by a drunken Tommy Harris at a dinner party, she admitted she was ‘suspicious’ of her husband, but then backtracked and proclaimed him ‘entirely innocent’.
She probably confided in her friend Flora Solomon, who cannot have been wholly surprised since Philby had attempted to recruit her as a Soviet agent back in 1936. Aileen certainly shared her fears with Nicholas Elliott, who blithely laughed off her suspicions. MI5 had assumed that Aileen was joking when she told Elliott that Philby might ‘do a “dis”’. She wasn’t. She lived in fear that he would defect and join his horrible friend Burgess in Moscow, leaving her with five young children and the perpetual shame of having married a traitor. Each time he left the house, she wondered if he would ever return. She threatened to start legal proceedings to gain custody of the children. She began drinking heavily again. Her grip on reality began to slip.
One day Elliott received a telephone call from Aileen, tearful and slurring.
‘Kim’s gone.’
‘Where?’ asked Elliott.
‘I think to Russia.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I got a telegram from Kim.’
At this, even Elliott’s granite loyalty wavered for a moment.
‘What does the telegram say?’ he asked, staggered.
‘It says: “Farewell forever. Love to the Children”.’
Reeling, Elliott called the duty officer at MI5. An alert was immediately sent out to sea ports and airports, with instructions to intercept Philby if he attempted to leave the country.
Oddly, when asked to produce the telegram, Aileen said she could not, saying it had been read to her over the telephone. Puzzled, Elliott made an inquiry at the Post Office, but could find no trace of a telegram sent to Aileen Philby. Once again, he rang the house in Hertfordshire. It was now late evening. This time, Philby answered. At the sound of his familiar voice, Elliott felt a flood of relief.
‘Thank God it’s you at last.’
‘Who were you expecting it to be?’ said Philby.
‘I’m glad you’re home.’
‘Where else would I be at night?’
‘The next time I see you I’ll tell you where else you could have been tonight,’ said Elliott, with a brittle laugh, and rang off.
Aileen had fabricated the entire episode, just as she had invented the story of being attacked in Istanbul, and staged her various maladies and injuries over the years. Elliott was fond and protective of Aileen, but he had become only too familiar with her mental illness. She suffered another series of ‘accidents’, and drove her car into the front of a shop. Her doctor sent her for psychiatric treatment. Philby told his friends that Aileen was ‘insane’. So far from alerting Elliott to the truth, Aileen’s behaviour redoubled his sympathy for his beleaguered friend, not only unjustly accused and deprived of his job, but now under attack from a wife who was plainly imagining things. Within MI6, Aileen’s suspicions were dismissed as the paranoid ravings of a madwoman.