In his darkest moments, Philby considered whether to reactivate his escape plan and defect to Moscow, but there was no way to contact Soviet intelligence without alerting MI5, and he knew it. He was trapped and isolated, aware that he was still just one Soviet defector away from exposure.
*
Vladimir Petrov was a Siberian peasant who, through hard work and docile obedience, had survived Stalin’s purges to rise steadily through the ranks of Soviet intelligence. After three decades of service to communism, he was a KGB colonel, and the rezident at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Publicly, Petrov was a time-server; privately, he was a rebel. He had seen his Siberian village destroyed by famine and forced collectivisation. From his work as a cipher clerk, he had learned the full extent of Stalin’s crimes. In August 1954, he defected in Australia. His wife Evdokia was picked up by a KGB snatch squad before she could do the same, and then rescued as her captors tried to manhandle her, missing one shoe, aboard a plane in Darwin.
As the highest-ranking defector since the war, Petrov brought a mass of information, on ciphers, agent networks, and the names of some 600 KGB officers working as diplomats around the world. He also furnished the first hard evidence that Burgess and Maclean were indeed in the Soviet Union (hitherto this had been assumed, but unverified), and living in Kuibyshev. Even more explosively, he confirmed that they had been tipped off to escape by another British official, a third man. In Whitehall, Fleet Street and beyond, the identity of this shadowy Third Man became the subject of rumour, innuendo and some highly informed speculation.
Philby heard of Petrov’s defection, and waited anxiously for Jim Skardon to reappear on his doorstep, this time with a police posse and arrest warrant. As the weeks passed without a knock on his door, he assumed, rightly, that the defector had not identified him by name. But he was haunted by the ‘worry that Petrov had brought in something substantial that I did not know about’, which might be used to trip him up if he was interrogated again.
Dick White, Philby’s old adversary, was planning precisely such an entrapment, having now taken over as director general of MI5. Guy Liddell had expected to get the post, but his friendships had damaged his reputation beyond repair. MI6 even hinted that Liddell himself might be a gay Soviet spy, pointing out that he ‘had parted from his wife, had a faintly homosexual air about him and, during the war, had been a close friend of Burgess, Philby and Blunt’. Bitterly disappointed, Liddell heartily congratulated White on his appointment, and resigned.
White saw the Petrov defection as an opportunity to flush out Philby once and for all, and he urged Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, to put the revelations about a Third Man out in the open. ‘It will undermine Philby. It will create uncertainty for Philby. We’ll lure him into a new interview and try again to get a confession.’ Eden refused, in part because Sir John Sinclair at MI6 insisted White was ‘pursuing a vendetta against Philby that was best ignored’. The feud between MI5 and MI6 was as fierce and damaging as ever.
Philby could not know it, but his Soviet masters were observing him, and worried. An assessment drawn up by the KGB British section reported that Agent Stanley was ‘desperately short of cash’ and drinking heavily. Yuri Modin asked Moscow what to do, pointing out that Philby had ‘rendered us immense services [and] might need to be reactivated in the future’. The Centre ordered that Philby be given ‘a large sum of money’, and a reassurance that the Soviet Union would stand by him. The KGB was not acting out of generosity, or even loyalty, but hard-headed pragmatism: a drunken and destitute spy was a liability, who might confess, or demand to be extricated. A lump of cash would keep him stable, it was hoped, and in place. But the handover (like most of Moscow’s directives) was easier ordered than done, since Philby was still under close surveillance. Moreover, Modin was instructed not to make direct personal contact; his mission was to pay Philby, under the noses of MI5, without actually seeing him. The KGB officer had managed to spirit Burgess and Maclean out of England; but getting Philby to stay put would be rather harder.
*
On the evening of 16 June 1954, Professor Anthony Blunt, former MI5 officer, Soviet spy and distinguished art historian, prepared to give a lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, of which he was a director. The subject was the Arch of Gallienus, a Roman triumphal arch in danger of demolition to make way for a modern housing project. The audience was composed of eager classicists, art students and learned members of the public who had read about the lecture in The Times and wanted to support the worthy cause of protecting Rome’s classical heritage. In the front row, facing the lectern, sat a squarely-built, fair-haired young man who had signed the visitors’ book in the name Greenglass, and identified himself as Norwegian.
Blunt’s long, baggy face wore an expression of scholarly concern as he distributed photographs of the threatened arch, before launching into an attack on the ‘villainous Italian authorities’ who wanted to do away with it. At the end, everyone clapped, and none more enthusiastically than Greenglass – although he had never been to Italy, knew nothing about classical architecture and could not have cared less if every arch in Rome was bulldozed and covered over in concrete. At the end of the lecture, Professor Blunt was mobbed, as he often was, by a bevy of enthusiastic, upholstered ladies keen to talk about art, who ‘vied with one another in showing off their knowledge’. Greenglass hung back on the fringes, and then, rather abruptly, barged through the throng, elbowing one of the professor’s admirers in the ribs as he did so, and thrust a postcard of a Renaissance painting into Blunt’s hand.
‘Excuse me,’ asked the rude Norwegian. ‘Do you know where I can find this picture?’
Blunt turned the postcard over, while the artistic ladies looked on frostily. On the back was written: ‘Tomorrow. 8 p.m. Angel’. The distinctive handwriting, Blunt knew at once, was that of Guy Burgess.
Blunt gave his questioner ‘a long stare’, and recognised him as Yuri Modin, the Soviet spy handler he had last seen in 1951, just before Burgess and Maclean fled. Then he looked back at the postcard and its message. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Yes.’
The next evening Blunt and Modin met in the Angel pub in Islington off the Caledonian Road, a nondescript drinking hole they had used for clandestine meetings in the past. They spoke first about Blunt’s situation – he had been interviewed by MI5, but did not yet seem to be a suspect – before moving on to Philby. Blunt reported that his fellow spy was in poor shape, jobless and penniless, and had already been subjected to a number of hostile interviews by MI5. Modin asked Blunt to pass on some cash to Philby. Reluctantly – for he had long ago forsaken espionage in favour of protecting Roman arches – Blunt agreed.
A few days later, Philby drove from Crowborough to Tonbridge, and bought a ticket for the first train to London. He waited until all the other passengers were aboard and the platform was deserted before boarding. At Vauxhall, he took the Underground to Tottenham Court Road, where he purchased a large coat and hat. For an hour, he wandered around, looking in shop windows to see if he was being followed, then had a drink in a bar, before buying a cinema ticket. He took a seat in the back row. Halfway through the performance, he slipped out. No one seemed to follow him. But for two more hours he walked aimlessly, then hopped on a bus, then jumped off again. By evening, he was in North London: ‘I was virtually certain I was clean.’