Elliott and Philby spied, plotted and socialised together, in a family friendship that intensified over time. Eleanor and Elizabeth became as close as their husbands. At weekends the two families shared a bathing cabin named ‘Acapulco’ on Khalde beach with Colonel Alec Brodie, a much-wounded, one-eyed, pipe-smoking war veteran who was military attaché at the embassy. During school holidays, the Elliott and Philby children mixed happily together. Elliott’s teenagers, Mark and Claudia, both liked Philby, an avuncular, amusing presence. ‘He was one of the few adults to take me seriously,’ Mark Elliott recalled.
Despite the rising political tension, Beirut was still a happy playground for expatriates and tourists, a place where, in Elliott’s words, one could ‘ski in the mornings and swim in the afternoons’, and enjoy hillside picnics in between. The fun did not stop at nightfall, but extended long into the night, with an endless round of cocktails and dinners. As they had in Switzerland, the Elliotts played host to a stream of visitors. One of the earliest was Ian Fleming, who called unannounced from the airport in November 1960, and invited himself to stay. Fleming was en route to Kuwait, on a lucrative assignment from the Kuwait Oil Company to write about the country. By now a hugely successful writer, Fleming continued his freelance intelligence activities and explained to Elliott that Naval Intelligence was keen to learn more about the defences of the Iraqi port at Basra. Elliott ‘promised to look after it’. Elliott asked for a favour in return: a rare fall of rain in Kuwait had brought out a crop of delicious white truffles. Would Fleming send back a box? This was Elliott’s style of espionage: a little spying in return for truffles. That evening Fleming announced he was meeting ‘an Armenian’ in the Place des Canons; Elliott got the distinct impression that the creator of 007 had in fact ‘arranged to see a pornographic film in full colour and sound’.
As the months passed, Elliott and Philby socialised together more and more, meeting regularly ‘at parties for British diplomats and journalists’. The Elliott family photographs from the summer of 1960 are filled with images of the intermingled Philby and Elliott clans, enjoying Beirut’s beachlife and nightlife: Philby is in most pictures, in bathing trunks, T-shirt or suit, smiling, tanned, and frequently, very obviously, drunk.
Philby’s behaviour was becoming increasingly outrageous, in ways reminiscent of the antics of Guy Burgess. ‘Out of fun rather than malice,’ wrote Elliott, he ‘would make some remark well calculated to stop the conversation dead in its tracks. Such remarks served to lighten the atmosphere of a dreary party but were often the cause of severe umbrage.’ Elliott egged him on, and recalled one particularly spectacular episode of Philby devilry that ‘caused a chain reaction of offence unparalleled in my experience’. In social fallout, the Cocktail Party from Hell came close to the Dinner Party from Hell.
It was at a cocktail party given in our flat by Elizabeth and myself when my parents, then pretty elderly, had come out to stay. We had invited some forty people, including the Philbys and our ambassador, Sir Moore Crosthwaite. There was an unusual pause in the babble of conversation during which Philby was heard to remark to Moore: ‘Don’t you think Anne [the wife of a member of the embassy staff who was standing next to him] has the finest breasts in Beirut?’ Moore was undoubtedly annoyed because he thought that the breasts of the wife of a member of his staff were not an appropriate subject of conversation at a cocktail party. Anne, while doubtless justifiably proud of that part of her anatomy, was annoyed at having it discussed in public and in particular with the ambassador. Her husband was annoyed as he agreed with the ambassador that his wife’s breasts were an off-target subject for cocktail party gossip. Jane, the wife of another member of the embassy staff, was annoyed because she thought she had better breasts than Anne. Jane’s husband was annoyed possibly because he thought his wife had been slighted. Eleanor Philby was more than just annoyed because she was not particularly well endowed in that respect and comparisons are odious. And, finally, Elizabeth was annoyed because she felt the whole party was getting out of hand. In fact the only person who thought the whole episode was a huge joke was Kim Philby himself.
And Nicholas Elliott, who regaled listeners with it for the rest of his life.
Privately, Elliott worried about Philby’s alcoholic intake. He had seen Aileen drink herself into the grave. Philby’s mother Dora was drinking a bottle of gin a day by the time of her death in 1957. Elliott feared the effect Philby’s boozing might be having on his health, and on his children: ‘He had no inhibitions about getting drunk in front of them.’ Philby even trained his young son Harry to mix a ‘fierce Martini’.
Philby and Elliott both worked assiduously to cultivate Americans, particularly those involved in intelligence, of which Beirut, as a Cold War battleground, was plentifully supplied. Relations between the CIA and MI6 had come under intense strain after the Burgess and Maclean defections and the accusations against Philby, but by 1960, the relationship was back on an even keel. In some quarters of Washington, suspicion of Philby still lingered: at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover remained convinced of his guilt, as did Bill Harvey. But within the CIA, it was generally agreed that if MI6 considered him trustworthy, and Harold Macmillan had said he was innocent, then Philby must be clean. Angleton had risen to new heights in the CIA. In 1954 he was named chief of the counter-intelligence staff, a position he would retain for the next two decades. As America’s premier spy-catcher, he was becoming ‘recognised as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world’. More gaunt and aloof than ever, Angleton trusted few, and mistrusted most, inspiring a peculiar mixture of awe and fear among his colleagues. He later claimed to have rumbled Philby, but his actions clearly indicate otherwise. According to one historian, Philby was still in amicable contact with Angleton from time to time, ‘and used those opportunities to reassure his American friend of his innocence’. If the CIA had suspected Philby of being a Soviet spy, then Angleton’s operatives in Beirut would have been under instructions to avoid him, watch him and, if possible, catch him. Instead, Philby mixed freely among the throngs of American spies.
One of the most flamboyant of these was Wilbur Crane Eveland, a boisterous intelligence veteran from the West Coast, who favoured full morning dress, and arrived in Beirut at around the same time as Philby as a special agent for Allen Dulles, the CIA chief. Working independently of the CIA station, Eveland’s role appears to have been that of anti-communist paymaster in the Middle East: he bankrolled CIA efforts to overthrow the Soviet-sponsored government in Syria, provided support to the Saud dynasty in Riyadh, and propped up Lebanon’s pro-Western president, Camille Chamoun. ‘He travelled regularly to the presidential palace with his briefcase stuffed with Lebanese pounds,’ according to Richard Beeston, ‘returning late at night to the American embassy to replenish the slush fund.’ Eveland had met Philby through the Brewers (Eveland and Eleanor were both from Spokane in Washington state), and they immediately struck up a friendship. He knew Philby had links with British intelligence, and saw him as someone ‘whose brain was there to be picked’, an attitude that was entirely reciprocated by Philby. Eleanor later told the CIA that Philby had once remarked that ‘all he had to do was to have one evening with Bill Eveland in Beirut and before it was over he would know of all his operations’.