With five children, one unstable wife and two major drinking habits to support, Philby needed money, but employment was hard to find for a man in his forties, who had ostensibly worked for the Foreign Office, but could not explain why he had left. He toyed with resuming his career in journalism, and submitted a number of articles to newspapers, but could find no permanent position. The telephone intercepts ‘disclosed very definitely that Philby was very active in looking for a job’, and failing. Finally, Jack Ivens, a ‘loyal ex-colleague’ from Section V, found him a job in his import-export firm. The salary was a meagre £600 a year. Aileen’s mother provided funds for the family to move into a large and ugly Edwardian house in Crowborough, ‘the poor man’s Surrey’ in Graham Greene’s words. Philby commuted, miserably, to an office in London, where he filled out paperwork, importing Spanish oranges and exporting castor oil to the US. He did not dare try to re-establish contact with his Soviet controllers. ‘Philby was under constant watch,’ wrote Yuri Modin. ‘Several times our counter-surveillance teams reported the presence of MI5 agents hovering in his vicinity.’ He was out in the cold as never before.
Philby had always been a high-functioning, sociable alcoholic. He was fast becoming an ill-functioning one, with a vile temper. MI5, listening in on his telephone line, noted that ‘Peach is apt to get blind drunk and behave abominably to his best friends.’ Long-suffering and loyal, Elliott put up with Philby’s outbursts. Philby leaned heavily on his old friend. In his strange double world, there was no contradiction here: he genuinely valued Elliott’s friendship, needed his support and relied on his advice, while lying to him. Philby did not disguise from Elliott his collapsing marriage but the subject was only ever tackled obliquely. Like most Englishmen of their class, they tended to steer around embarrassing emotional topics.
Elliott lent Philby money when funds ran low, paid his club bills, and took him to watch the cricket at Lord’s. He urged Philby to go on the offensive: ‘You must fight like hell. If I was accused of spying, I would go to the Prime Minister and complain,’ he told him. Philby ‘smiled wanly’ at this suggestion. ‘The whole family went through a bad time,’ wrote Elliott, who tried to buoy up his friend by insisting that his exile from MI6 was strictly temporary; Philby would soon be back in the club, and resuming his career where he had left off.
Sir Stewart Menzies was also firm in his support. On 1 April 1952, he took Philby to dinner at the Travellers’ Club, and asked him ‘whether he wished for any advance of the bonus that was given to him at the time of his resignation’. C later discussed this lunch with Guy Liddell of MI5, who reported:
C seemed to have reached the conclusion that Kim was innocent. I said that I had come to the conclusion that the only thing to do in cases of this kind, where one knew an individual fairly intimately, was to sink one’s personal view and allow those concerned to get on with the job, purely on the basis of ascertainment of facts. Otherwise one was liable to get misled . . . Kim does not, apparently, bear any particular resentment against this department. If he had been in our position he would have reacted in the same way, even down to the question of withholding his passport.
Elliott’s conviction that his friend would soon return to the MI6 fold was echoed by Philby’s main ally in the US. James Angleton assured a colleague in 1952 that ‘Philby would recover from his present predicament and would yet become chief of the British Secret Service.’ Philby knew that would never be. Cut off from his Soviet handlers, stuck in an ill-paid job he loathed, expecting MI5 to pounce at any moment, living with a wife who knew his secret, Philby’s life was spiralling downwards.
Elliott did what he could to bolster Philby’s flagging spirits, dispensing encouragement and support. MI5, combing through the transcripts of Philby’s bugged telephone, expressed surprise and irritation at ‘the extent to which Peach is still in touch with, and subsidised by, MI6’. Philby’s oldest son John was now eleven, and though Philby himself might be committed to destroying the British establishment he was nonetheless anxious to get his sons into a good public school. Eton and Westminster were beyond his budget, but Elliott came up with the solution. He approached his father Claude (now Provost of Eton) who agreed to get John Philby (and later his brother Tommy) into Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire, ‘of which he was governor and which, being heavily endowed, was not too expensive’. The old school tie was still pulling Philby along.
Elliott closely monitored the progress of the Philby case; or rather the lack of it, for the tussle between MI5 and MI6 had settled into acrimonious stalemate. Ronnie Reed, an MI5 officer who had known Philby from the war, noted ‘the intense disagreement between our two services on Philby’. In June 1952, Stewart Menzies retired, to be replaced by his deputy, Major General Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, a tall, military traditionalist, set in his ways. (His lunch never varied: one grilled herring and a glass of water.) Sinclair was just as determined as his predecessor to stand by Philby: the new C ‘refused to let one of his chaps down’. He did, however, agree that serving MI6 officers should be discouraged from socialising with Philby, a directive which Elliott and others simply ignored. MI5, meanwhile, continued to dig for evidence, convinced that other moles must be lurking inside the establishment, and enraged at the way MI6 had closed ranks. The Watchers listened and observed, waiting for Philby to make a slip.
MI5’s telephone intercepts would eventually fill thirty-three volumes: they revealed no espionage on Philby’s part, but laid bare the rapidly worsening state of his marriage. He had started an affair with a woman in London, a civil servant, and frequently did not return home for days at a time. When he did, the couple fought bitterly. Philby took to sleeping in a tent in the garden. He told friends that Aileen had denounced him to the Foreign Office, and this had prevented him from getting a decent job. He even claimed she had tried to kill him. Aileen likewise suspected Philby of harbouring murderous designs. Secretly and unethically, her psychiatrist was passing information to MI5. One report noted: ‘In [Aileen’s] opinion, and that of her psychiatrist, Philby had by a kind of mental cruelty to her “done his best to make her commit suicide”.’ The same psychiatrist suggested that Philby might be homosexual, despite copious evidence to the contrary. With little money coming in from her estranged husband, Aileen was reduced to working in the kitchen of a grand house on Eaton Square, simply to pay the bills. Nicholas Elliott tried to shore her up, with financial and moral support. Her workplace, he wrote, ‘was close enough to our house in Wilton Street to spend her off-duty hours with us’.
After eighteen unhappy months selling castor oil and oranges, Philby found himself jobless again after Jack Ivens’s import-export firm went bust. He scratched around, trying to make a living from freelance journalism, but with scant success. He was now virtually dependent on friends and family. His father, living in Saudi Arabia as an adviser to Ibn Saud, sent what money he could spare. Elliott paid the school fees of the Philby children. Tommy Harris arranged for Philby to write a book about the Spanish Civil War for a London publisher with a £600 advance. The book was never written, and the deal appears to have been a ruse by the wealthy Harris to funnel money to his friend without Philby discovering the source.
Philby continued to socialise with his friends in intelligence, but tensely. One evening Guy Liddell went to dinner with Tommy Harris, and discovered that Philby had been invited too. He greeted Philby ‘in the normal way’, although both knew the situation could hardly have been stranger. MI5 was convinced of Philby’s treachery; Harris himself was now under suspicion, his telephone bugged in case some clue emerged during his conversations with Philby. The dinner guests all tried to pretend that the occasion was no different from the many that had preceded it. Philby seemed ‘somewhat worried’, Liddell wrote in his diary, and left early.