In truth, Philby was going soft, and drinking hard: content to do a little journalism, a little espionage on the side for both sides, but nothing too strenuous. He was coasting, it seemed, towards quiet and comfortable irrelevance as a second-rate journalist, and a minor spy.
Then Nicholas Elliott arrived in Beirut, as the new station chief of MI6, and the wheel of their friendship turned again.
See Notes on Chapter 14
15
The Fox who Came to Stay
Beirut was another plum posting. The Crabb affair had done Nicholas Elliott’s career no lasting damage, and he had performed well during his brief stint in Vienna. Indeed, within MI6 he was still considered a high-flier, the leader of the Robber Barons. It was said that, ‘but for his preference for operations, not administration, he might well have been appointed C’. Elliott was pleased to be moving on from Austria. ‘I have no wish to be churlish about our time in Vienna,’ he wrote (Elliott’s politeness even extended to cities), ‘nevertheless we were not unhappy’ to leave. With the Middle East heating up, Beirut was an important step up the intelligence ladder. The Elliotts travelled by boat from Genoa, and as they pulled into the port, Elliott marvelled at how little Beirut had changed since his last visit in 1942. Elizabeth had been his secretary then, and he had courted her over lunch at the Hotel Lucullus, whose restaurant was famed for its French-Lebanese cuisine. As soon as they landed, Elliott announced, with romantic fanfare, they would be lunching at the Lucullus again. No sooner were they seated, than a beaming Kim Philby appeared and wrapped Elliott in a welcoming hug. ‘It was a most agreeable reunion,’ recalled Elliott, who pretended that the meeting had been accidental. He was taking over as station chief from Paul Paulson, but Philby was the person he wanted to see on his first day in Beirut. They were joined by Eleanor, an ‘excellent bouillabaisse’ was served, more bottles were opened, glasses were raised and drained. Elliott happily turned to Philby: ‘Fill me in, old boy.’
The Elliotts moved into a flat on the top floor of the Immeuble Tabet on the Rue Verdun, on the border between the Christian and Muslim quarters, not far from the Philbys. The apartment had ‘cool, high rooms, wide balconies and marble floors’ and was ‘perfect in every way’. That evening, as they listened to the muezzin’s call wafting over the city, Elliott ‘thought nostalgically of the gentle sound of the Mullahs calling the faithful to prayer from the minarets of Istanbul many years before’. He was as happy as he had ever been, and back in his element, in a foreign city seething with espionage possibilities, fighting communist aggression alongside his oldest friend, his most trusted colleague, and the man who would explain to him the mysteries of the Middle East. Once more they would be ‘two old friends in Crown service on the frontiers’.
As Eleanor Philby observed, Elliott had hitherto been a ‘European specialist and knew little of Arab politics. He came green to the Middle East.’ He had much to learn, as he admitted: ‘Apart from all the political complexities and the plotting – almost any major financial or political intrigue in the Middle East at that time had its roots in Beirut – you had to get to grips with the Lebanese character. The labyrinths of Lebanese politics were of daunting complexity.’ Philby would be his guide, ‘his personal adviser’.
The arrival of a new spy chief did not go unnoticed among Beirut’s journalists. One left this portrait of Elliott:
He was a thin, spare man with a reputation as a shrewd operator whose quick humorous glance behind round glasses gave a clue to his sardonic mind. In manner and dress he suggested an Oxbridge don at one of the smarter colleges, but with a touch of worldly ruthlessness not always evident in academic life. Foreigners liked him, appreciating his bonhomie and his fund of risqué stories. He got on particularly well with Americans. The formal, ladylike figure of his wife in the background contributed to the feeling that British intelligence in Beirut was being directed by a gentleman.
Elliott and Philby were once again inseparable, professionally and socially. The pace of Philby’s intelligence-gathering, hitherto leisurely, even lackadaisical, suddenly became frenetic, as Elliott ‘put Kim to work, setting him targets, sending him on trips, requesting reports which were then combed over in conversation’. During his first four years in Beirut, Philby had ventured outside Lebanon only as far as Syria, and once to visit his father in Saudi Arabia. Now, at Elliott’s behest, he scrambled all over the Middle East, ostensibly on newspaper assignments, to Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait and Yemen. The hitherto indolent journalist was a reporting whirlwind. But a careful observer might have spotted that his output fell far short of his industriousness; he was visiting many more places and people than he was writing about, at least publicly. In the first nine months of 1960, he filed just six stories for the Observer. One editor from the Economist paid him a visit, noted how seldom he seemed to write for the magazine, and casually asked him if he found it difficult ‘serving two masters’. Philby was momentarily speechless, until he realised she was referring to his newspaper employers, not his espionage.
Philby delivered a torrent of information to Elliott, ‘mainly political and personality reporting’ and ‘reports about political developments in most Arab states’. The two men would huddle together, for long debriefing sessions. ‘They used to meet once or twice a week,’ wrote Eleanor. ‘Vanishing into another room and leaving me to gossip with Elizabeth.’ Elliott’s support and confidence was demonstrated in other, more practical ways. Towards the end of 1960, Philby returned home late one night, clutching a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, happily scattering them around the room. ‘This is going to make our Christmas!’ Eleanor had no doubt the money came from Elliott, an early Christmas present for his best friend and most industrious agent.
Some have claimed that Elliott’s energetic deployment of Philby was merely a ruse, to see if ‘greater participation in the British intelligence effort’ would reveal contact with the Soviets. There is little evidence to support this theory. If Elliott had suspected Philby, he would have put a tail on him, and easily discovered his meetings with Petukhov. He did not. Dick White’s instructions were to ‘keep an eye on Philby’, but there was no suggestion that he should be investigated, probed or put under surveillance. White seems to have accepted, at least outwardly, that the Philby case was closed. Far from doubting him, Elliott trusted Philby completely, and his determination to employ him to the full reflected only ‘Elliott’s overt and innocent friendship’, and an admiration stretching back twenty years.
Philby, in turn, was buoyed by his return to active intelligence work, and seemed to relish the confidence reposed in him by his old friend. Eleanor noticed the change in her husband’s demeanour following Elliott’s arrivaclass="underline" ‘I had begun to feel that Kim was bored with journalism, and that writing articles for newspapers did not wholly satisfy him. His meetings with [Elliott] were more like real work.’ What Philby considered his real work, of course, consisted of passing to Soviet intelligence every scrap of information he could gather, both on his travels, and from Elliott. Their relationship was running along the old tracks in more ways than Elliott knew.
Philby’s value as a Soviet agent increased in direct proportion to his activities as a British agent, and as Elliott’s informant he was privy to important information, including the identities of MI6 contacts in the region, as well as sympathetic Arab politicians and officials on the payroll. Elliott achieved a remarkable coup by being able to ‘broker a deal with the director of Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] for the exchange of intelligence on the Middle East’. Philby did not know everything that Elliott knew; but from the instructions issued by Elliott, he at least knew what MI6 wanted to know, and that, in the negative world of spying, is almost as valuable. Yuri Modin was pleased with Agent Stanley: ‘In all he served us well.’