At dusk, three spies converged on a small square off the Caledonian Road. It appears that Modin, following orders, made no direct contact with Philby that night and spoke only to Blunt as he passed over the package, while Philby kept his distance, ready to run. In Modin’s melodramatic recollection, ‘the dark silhouette kept pace with us along the tree-lined path; a solid, foursquare figure, shrouded in an overcoat’. Philby returned to Crowborough with £5,000 in cash and a ‘refreshed spirit’, buoyed by the knowledge that he was back in contact with Soviet intelligence after a four-year hiatus. Modin had also passed on a reassurance, through Blunt, that the defector ‘Petrov knew nothing about his career as a Soviet agent’. The handover in the dark London park transformed both Philby’s finances and his state of mind. ‘I was no longer alone.’
Philby’s Soviet friends had rallied to him; his British friends would now do the same. At around the time of the Petrov defection, a group of officers within MI6, led by Nicholas Elliott, launched a concerted campaign to clear his name.
Elliott had by now taken up a new post as head of MI6’s London station. Codenamed ‘BIN’ and based in Londonderry House, Victoria, the London station acted, in effect, like any other MI6 outpost, but on British soil, with a staff of twenty officers running intelligence operations against diplomats, businessmen and spies, recruiting agents in foreign embassies, and monitoring the activities of visiting dignitaries. Elliott’s new role enabled him to behave like a spy abroad, but within easy reach of his club.
By 1954, a distinct faction had emerged within MI6, with considerable influence over the chief, Sir John Sinclair: these were the Young Turks of the intelligence service, men like Elliott who had learned the spy game in the heady days of war when, with sufficient grit and imagination, anything had seemed possible. Inside the service, Elliott and his like were known as the ‘Robber Barons’, swashbuckling types with an acute sense of their own importance and little respect for civilian authority. They believed in covert action, taking risks and, whenever necessary, breaking the rules. Above all, they believed in intelligence as a sort of patriotic religion, a British bulwark against barbarism. George Kennedy Young, a good friend of both Elliott and Philby who would rise to become deputy director of MI6, put into words the creed of this increasingly influential and ambitious group. ‘It is the spy who has been called on to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests,’ Young insisted, with an arrogance that did not bode well.
Men’s minds are shaped of course by their environments and we spies, although we have our professional mystique, do perhaps live closer to the realities and hard facts of international relations than other practitioners of government. We are relatively free of the problems of status, of precedence, departmental attitudes and evasions of personal responsibility, which create the official cast of mind. We do not have to develop, like Parliamentarians conditioned by a lifetime, the ability to produce the ready phrase, the smart reply and the flashing smile. And so it is not surprising these days that the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.
Men like Young and Elliott saw themselves as Britain’s secret guardians, members of a chosen brotherhood unconstrained by normal conventions. Kim Philby had been a role model for many of the Robber Barons; his wordly savoir-faire and wartime successes affirmed their sense of collective identity. They now set out to rescue him.
On 20 July 1955, ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair wrote to Dick White, his counterpart in MI5, claiming that Buster Milmo’s interrogation of Kim Philby had been ‘biased’, and that the former MI6 officer had been the ‘victim of a miscarriage of justice’. In a later memo to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, ‘C’ summed up the case for Philby’s defence:
The Milmo Report, which produces no single piece of direct evidence to show that Philby was a Soviet agent or that he was the ‘Third Man’, is therefore a case for the prosecution inadmissible at law and unsuccessful in security intelligence. It is constructed of suppositious and circumstantial evidence, summing up in a circular argument everything the ingenuity of a prosecutor could devise against a suspect. It seems likely to remain as a permanently accusing finger pointed at Philby [who] was in fact convicted of nothing by the investigation in 1951 and despite four years of subsequent investigation is still convicted of nothing. It is entirely contrary to the English tradition for a man to have to prove his innocence … in a case where the prosecution has nothing but suspicion to go upon.
The case should be re-examined, he said, and Philby given an opportunity to defend himself. ‘Produce the evidence, and there’ll be no further dispute,’ Sinclair told White. White reluctantly agreed that Philby should be interviewed once more, knowing that the case against him was not much stronger than it had been in 1951. The stage was now set for a final showdown, and Elliott, Philby’s ‘greatest defender’, would be waiting in the wings to stage-manage the drama.
On 18 September, the People newspaper broke the story of Vladimir Petrov’s defection, with a series of dramatic revelations: Burgess and Maclean had both been recruited as Soviet agents while students at Cambridge; their flight to Moscow, just as Maclean was about to be arrested, had been orchestrated by the Soviet intelligence service; these were not ‘missing diplomats’, as the government had maintained for so long, but spies on the run. British secrecy laws had been used to hide the truth and shield the government from embarrassment.
Harold Macmillan, the new Foreign Secretary, faced a major crisis: ‘We are going to have to say something,’ he said gloomily. Five days later, the government issued an eight-page White Paper purporting to explain the Burgess and Maclean affair. It was a peculiar mixture of half-truth and evasion that played down the scandal and made no mention of Kim Philby, whose name was now being widely whispered, and in some cases, shouted. At a dinner party, Aileen Philby rose unsteadily to her feet and upbraided her husband: ‘I know you are the Third Man.’ Even Philby’s wife was denouncing him in public; the press would not be far behind. The White Paper was dismissed as a cover-up.
On the other side of the Atlantic, J. Edgar Hoover was as convinced of Philby’s guilt as James Angleton was sure of his innocence, and enraged at Britain’s failure to arrest him. The FBI chief decided to bring matters to a head, with a characteristic act of subterfuge. But first, Philby prepared for one last interrogation.
On 7 October, two weeks after the publication of the White Paper, Philby presented himself at an MI6 safe house near Sloane Square, where he was ushered into a room furnished with a patterned sofa and chairs arranged around a small table; on one wall stood an ancient sideboard with a telephone on top. Inside the telephone was a high-quality microphone. An amplifier, placed under the floorboards beneath Philby’s chair, fed sound to the microphone, which was then relayed to Leconfield House, MI5 headquarters. Here the conversation would be recorded on acetate gramophone records, and then handed to typists who would transcribe every word.
Philby was nervous. This would be his fourth formal interrogation. Despite Modin’s reassurances, he feared Petrov might have armed the investigators with some damning new clue. Philby had told MI6 he ‘welcomed the chance to clear his name’, but in truth he was tired, and worried. He braced himself for another flaying.
Instead, what he experienced was closer to a fireside chat than an inquisition, an interview utterly different from any that had come before. A committee of inquiry, set up by Macmillan, had formally ruled that this round of questioning should be the responsibility of MI6, not MI5. This would not be an inquisition, in the manner of Buster Milmo, but an internal review of the situation carried out by two of Philby’s former colleagues ‘who knew him well’. It seems probable that one of them was Nick Elliott.