Philby established a similarly cosy relationship with Edgar J. Applewhite, the clever, sharp-suited, Yale-educated CIA station chief sent to Lebanon in 1958. Applewhite knew of the earlier suspicions surrounding Philby, but cultivated him nonetheless, at first guardedly, later wholeheartedly. The American concluded Philby was ‘much too sophisticated to give his allegiance to such a doctrinaire business as Marxism’, and besides, the Anglophile Applewhite ‘liked to talk to Philby about Arab problems’ and enjoyed the Englishman’s erudite company. The American intelligence community was, if anything, even more welcoming to Philby than the British one, for this charming, open-handed Englishman seemed trustworthy, the sort of Englishman who had helped America to win the Second World War and was now helping her to win the Cold War. ‘Philby was friendly with all the Yanks in Beirut,’ George Young later noted. ‘A lot of them babbled. He was pretty good at getting them to talk.’
One American spy talked more than any of the others, and would be drawn into the heart of the Philby-Elliott circle. Miles Copeland Jr was a drawling jazz musician from the Deep South, a wartime spy, former CIA agent and now a public relations executive and espionage fixer. The son of a doctor from Birmingham, Alabama, Copeland had spent his teenage years gambling on the riverboats, before dramatically changing tack and heading to Alabama University to study advanced mathematics. A gifted trumpeter, he played in an otherwise all-black radio band, and ended up in the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Copeland joined the OSS soon after Pearl Harbor, and headed to London with the other young Americans eager to learn the spying game. There he became a close friend of James Angleton (who left him a bequest in his will) and went on to become one of the most effective – and dubious – operatives in the CIA: he helped to organise a coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, and tried to steer his friend Colonel Nasser of Egypt away from Moscow. Copeland shared Angleton’s views of America’s role in the world, believing that the CIA had a right and a duty to steer political and economic events in the Middle East: ‘The United States had to face and define its policy in all three sectors that provided the root causes of American interests in the region: the Soviet threat, the birth of Israel, and petroleum.’ By 1956 he was living in Beirut, a partner in the industrial consultancy and PR firm Copeland and Eichelberger, no longer officially in the CIA but alert to every aspect of agency activities, with access to the daily cables passing through Applewhite’s office. So far from hiding his intelligence links, Copeland paraded them as part of his business pitch.
Copeland had ‘known and liked’ Philby since 1944 when, alongside Angleton, he had studied the art of counter-espionage under Philby’s tutelage in Ryder Street, London. Their friendship was renewed in Beirut, and Copeland would later claim to have known Philby ‘better than anyone else, excepting two or three British intelligence officers’. Elliott also relished the piratical Copeland, ‘a humorous and highly intelligent extrovert [and] a most colourful and entertaining friend’. The three families formed an intense triangular bond: Eleanor Philby, Elizabeth Elliott and Lorraine Copeland, Miles’s outspoken Scottish wife, studied archaeology in the same class at the American University in Beirut, and went on digs; their husbands plotted and drank together; their children played tennis, swam and went skiing together. The Copelands lived in a large hilltop house (known to the local Lebanese, with blunt precision, as the ‘CIA House’), which they filled with their friends and their children, one of whom, Stewart, would go on to become the drummer in the band The Police. As Beeston recalled, Copeland was the life and souclass="underline" ‘Generous, outrageous, always fun, he never took himself too seriously and had a thoroughly irreverent approach to the intelligence profession.’ He was also, in Elliott’s estimation, ‘one of the most indiscreet men I have ever met’ – which endeared him even more to Elliott and Philby, for different reasons.
Copeland was an incurable gossip and an unstoppable show-off. ‘I could trust him with any secret that had no entertainment value,’ wrote Elliott. What neither Philby nor Elliott knew was that Copeland was also a paid spy for James Angleton, their friend. As the chief of CIA counter-intelligence, Angleton maintained his own network of informers, and Copeland was one of them, though he appeared nowhere on CIA accounts. Their arrangement was simple: Copeland would forward his (very large) entertainment bills to Angleton for payment; in return, Copeland kept Angleton abreast of what was going on in Beirut.
Many years later, Copeland claimed that Angleton had specifically instructed him to ‘keep an eye on Philby’ and ‘report signs that he might be spying for the Soviets’; he even claimed to have sent a Lebanese security officer to follow Philby but found that the Englishman was ‘still practising his old tradecraft [and] invariably shook off his tail’. Like Angleton’s later assertions, Copeland’s claim to have monitored Philby at Angleton’s behest is almost certainly untrue. He was a practised fabulist, given to ‘entertaining and colourful invention’, in Elliott’s words. If he had really put Philby under surveillance, then he would easily have caught him. But he didn’t, for the very obvious (and very embarrassing) reason that he did not believe Philby was a Soviet spy, and neither did Angleton.
The major players in the Philby story were invariably wise after the event. Spies, even more than most people, invent the past to cover up mistakes. The Philby case has probably attracted more retrospective conspiracy theory than any other in the history of espionage: Dick White of MI6 was running a ruse to trap him; Nicholas Elliott was secretly jousting with him; James Angleton suspected him and set Miles Copeland to spy on him; Philby’s fellow journalists (another tribe adept at misremembering the past) later claimed that they had always seen something fishy in his behaviour. Even Eleanor, his wife, would later look back, and claim to have discovered clues to his real identity. No one likes to admit they have been utterly conned. The truth was simpler, as it almost always is: Philby was spying on everyone, and no one was spying on him, because he fooled them all.
Every few weeks, on a Wednesday evening, Philby would stand holding a newspaper on his balcony; later the same night he would slip away to a nondescript backstreet restaurant in the Armenian quarter called Vrej (Armenian for ‘revenge’), where Petukhov was waiting.
For Kim Philby, these were days of professional satisfaction and domestic tranquillity. Not since 1949 had his double lives co-existed so comfortably and invisibly: admired and feted by American and British intelligence officials, protected by Elliott and Angleton, paid regularly by the Observer and the Economist, secretly by MI6 and the KGB. Evenings were spent in a social whirl on the Anglo-American diplomatic circuit. On the rare occasions they stayed in, Philby would cook, and then read German poetry to his wife in ‘a melodious voice’ without a stutter. The happy household was completed by the addition of an exotic and unlikely pet, after some friends bought a baby fox cub from a Bedouin in the Jordan Valley, and presented it to the Philbys. They called it Jackie, and reared it by hand. The animal slept on the sofa and obeyed commands, like a dog. Jackie also shared Philby’s taste for alcohol, ‘lapping up’ whisky from a saucer. ‘She was affectionate and playful, cantering round the top of the parapet of our balcony.’ Philby found the animal ‘hopelessly endearing’, and wrote a sentimental article for Country Life entitled ‘The Fox Who Came to Stay’.
These were the ‘happiest years’, wrote Eleanor.