Eleanor Brewer was a forty-two-year-old sometime architect, amateur sculptor and former Red Cross worker from Seattle, married to Sam Pope Brewer, the New York Times correspondent in Beirut. She was tall and slim, sweet-natured, and restless. She had met her husband in wartime Istanbul, where he was reporting for the New York Times and she was working in the overseas branch of the Office of War Information. Nicholas Elliott had known them both in those years, as another glamorous couple in the Istanbul throng. By 1956 Eleanor was unhappily married and bored. Beeston recalled her as a ‘rangy, steady-drinking American, who looked tough and sophisticated. Underneath she was a romantic, and politically naïve.’ Like most people who proclaim themselves free spirits, she was fiercely conventional.
Sam Brewer had first encountered Philby while covering the Spanish Civil War, so when the American newspaperman learned that his former colleague had arrived in Beirut, he was eager to extend a welcome. In early September, Brewer left Beirut on an extended reporting trip, and told his wife to keep an eye out for Philby: ‘If I should meet Kim I was to introduce him to our friends, and do what I could to help him,’ she later recalled. Eleanor’s welcome to Philby would prove rather warmer than her husband had intended.
On 12 September 1956, Eleanor Brewer was drinking with some friends at the St Georges, when someone pointed out Kim Philby, sitting at the bar. She sent a message via the waiter, inviting him to join their party.
What touched me first about Kim Philby was his loneliness. A certain old-fashioned reserve set him apart from the easy familiarity of the other journalists. He was then forty-four, of medium height, very lean with a handsome heavily lined face. His eyes were an intense blue . . . He had a gift of such intimacy that I found myself talking freely to him. I was very impressed by his beautiful manners. We took him under our wing. He soon became one of our closest friends.
Philby spent Christmas with the Brewers. Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife. The secret lovers met at a little café they called the Shaky Floor, although the shakiness of the floor may have been due to the amount they drank there. They shared picnics in the hills, smoked hubble-bubble pipes in the Arab coffee houses, and exchanged love notes written in gushing teenage prose. ‘Kim was a delightful companion,’ Eleanor wrote. ‘I had never met a kinder, more interesting person in my entire life.’ Eleanor was besotted, and blamed her husband for their deteriorating marriage. Sam was only interested in politics, she complained, and criticised her cooking: ‘My soufflés were never quite right.’ As in his other life, Philby revelled in the subterfuge, the secret messages and surreptitious meetings, the thrill of deception. While conducting his clandestine love affair, Philby discreetly checked for any signs of surveillance. No one was following him.
Philby’s journalism from Beirut was solid, if unspectacular. When asked to write on a subject he considered too fluffy – such as Arabian slave girls – he used the pseudonym ‘Charles Garner’. Even in journalism, he embraced a double existence. He also began to collect information for his MI6 handlers. He possessed a ‘sound knowledge of their requirements’. Much of his early intelligence work in Lebanon involved chatting informally to senior Arab politicians, and then ‘telling the British government what they really thought’. MI6 was evidently satisfied: a year after Philby’s arrival in Beirut, the visiting head of MI6’s Middle East desk took him to lunch at an expensive restaurant overlooking the sea, and told him his status was being confirmed and his retainer increased. ‘Anxious to be in their good books,’ Philby resolved to work ‘as conscientiously as possible’ for MI6, while awaiting the inevitable call from the KGB.
Philby’s Beirut habits were regular. At midday he would repair to the Normandie Hotel, less conspicuous and cheaper than the St Georges, to down his first drink of the day, vodka with V8, open his post, and read the newspapers. One afternoon, a chunky young man in his thirties, evidently a foreigner, approached Philby at his corner table, and presented him with his card: ‘Petukhov, Soviet Trade Mission’.
‘I read your articles in the Observer and in The Economist, Mr Philby,’ he said. ‘I find them very deep. I sought you out to ask you for the favour of your time for a conversation. I am particularly interested in the prospects for a Common Market of the Arab countries.’
Philby could have put an end to his double life at that moment. He could have explained to Petukhov that he had no interest in discussing Arab economics with him, and so conveyed a message to the KGB that he was no longer in the game. Other agents recruited in the 1930s, including Anthony Blunt, had successfully disengaged from Soviet intelligence. He had a new life, a new lover, and two interesting, compatible and remunerative jobs: with the protection of Nicholas Elliott, he was safe from further investigation by MI5; his reputation as a journalist and Middle East expert was growing. He could have rejected the approach from the KGB with impunity. Instead, he invited Petukhov to tea at his flat.
Philby would later frame his decision as one of ideological purity, consistent with the ‘total commitment to the Soviet Union’ he had made at the age of twenty-one. He did what he did, in his own estimation, out of pure political conviction, the guiding principle of his life. He looked with disdain on others who had seen the horrors of Stalinism and abandoned ship. ‘I stayed the course,’ he wrote, ‘in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberration of individuals.’ Philby later claimed that he had experienced moments of doubt, and that his views had been ‘influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime’. But there is no evidence that he ever questioned the ideology he had discovered at Cambridge, changed his opinions, or seriously acknowledged the iniquities of practical communism. Philby never shared or discussed his views, either with friend or foe. Instead, he retained and sustained his faith without the need for priests or fellow believers, in perfect isolation. Philby regarded himself as an ideologue and a loyalist; in truth, he was a dogmatist, valuing only one opinion: his own.
But there was more than politics in Philby’s eager return to the embrace of the KGB. Philby enjoyed deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce. Some men like to parade their knowledge. Others revel in the possession of information that they decline to share, and the private sense of superiority that this brings. Philby was a faithless husband, but a kind lover, a good friend, a gentle father and a generous host. He had a talent for tenderness. But he also relished withholding the truth from those he was closest to; there was the Philby they knew, and then there was the Philby only he knew. The alcohol helped maintain the double life. For an alcoholic has already become divorced from his or her real self, hooked on an artificial reality. Philby did not want to give up spying, and he probably could not have stopped if he had wanted to: because he was addicted.
The day after their encounter at the Normandie, Petukhov arrived promptly at Philby’s flat at three in the afternoon – it was a dangerous place for a rendezvous, and one that would not be repeated. The ground rules were established. If Philby wanted a meeting, he would stand on his balcony holding a newspaper at a given hour; if he needed to see Petukhov urgently, he would be holding a book. Henceforth, Philby and his new case officer would meet at regular intervals, always after sunset, always in Beirut, always in some discreet corner of the city. The KGB residence in Beirut was ‘a hive of activity’, according to Yuri Modin, with agents deployed throughout the Middle East. Philby was told that his first priority was to ascertain ‘the intentions of the United States and British governments in the area’. He happily set to work.