Philby’s world of contented marriage and secret duplicity was about to fall apart, with two deaths, one defection and the unmasking of a Soviet spy within British intelligence who had nothing whatever to do with Kim Philby.
See Notes on Chapter 15
16
A Most Promising Officer
St John Philby, that rebel traditionalist, attended an Orientalists’ conference in Moscow in the summer of 1960, then the Lord’s cricket test match in London, in which England trounced South Africa, much to his satisfaction. On his way back to Saudi Arabia, he stopped off to visit his son in Beirut. At sixty-five, St John was as cantankerous and complicated as ever. He checked in to the Normandie Hotel, where he was ‘treated with the deference due to an Eastern potentate’. Nicholas Elliott threw a lunch party for him, not without trepidation, knowing the elder Philby’s capacity for extreme and unprovoked rudeness. ‘Elizabeth and I were among the few English people to whom St John Philby was prepared to be civil.’ To Elliott’s surprise, the lunch was a social and diplomatic success. Humphrey Trevelyan, the British ambassador to Iraq, who was staying with the Elliotts, ‘drew the old man out into telling us the story of his relationship with Ibn Saud’. The Philbys, the Copelands and several other friends attended this ‘memorable occasion’, lubricated by a small river of Lebanese wine.
Elliott described the ensuing events: St John Philby ‘left at tea time, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of the embassy staff in a night club, had a heart attack, and died’. The last words of this brilliant and impossible man were: ‘God, I’m bored.’ He left behind a shelf of scholarly works, two families, a black-throated partridge named after him (Alectoris philbyi), and an enduring trail of notoriety.
The relationship between father and son, Elliott reflected, had been ‘a mixture of love and hate’. Philby admired and feared his father, whose domination, he felt, had caused his stammer. Back in the 1930s, he had spied on St John, while reporting to Soviet intelligence that his father was ‘not completely well in the head’. But they had grown closer in later life, particularly after Kim’s move to the Middle East. Philby told Elliott that his father had once advised him: ‘If you feel strongly enough about anything you must have the guts to go through with it no matter what anyone might think.’ Both Philbys had certainly done that. Kim later wrote that had his father lived to learn the truth about him, he would have been ‘thunderstruck, but by no means disapproving’. That verdict is questionable. The elder Philby was a contrarian, a rule-breaker and something of an intellectual thug, but he was no traitor. Even so, he had always supported his son, driven his ambition, and undoubtedly planted the seeds of his sedition.
Kim buried St John Philby with full Islamic rites under his Muslim name, and then disappeared into the bars of Beirut. Elliott noted that Philby ‘went out of circulation for days’. Eleanor was more specific: ‘He drank himself senseless’ and emerged from this ferocious drinking bout a changed man, frailer in both body and spirit. Philby’s mother Dora had always doted on him, while his relationship with St John was often tense; yet St John’s death affected him far more. ‘Kim seemed overwhelmed by his father’s death,’ wrote Richard Beeston. His moorings began to slip.
*
A few months earlier, the British intelligence community in Beirut had been enlivened by the arrival of a new and glamorous addition to their ranks. At thirty-eight, George Behar had lived several lives already. Born in Rotterdam in 1922, to a Dutch mother and Egyptian-Jewish father, as a teenager he had joined the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands, endured internment, and then fled to London disguised as a monk, where he joined MI6, trained as an interrogator in multiple languages, and changed his name to the more English-sounding George Blake. After the war he was posted to Korea to set up an MI6 intelligence network, but was captured by the advancing North Korean communist forces soon after his arrival, and held in captivity for three years. Finally emerging in 1953, Blake was welcomed back by MI6 as a returning hero and sent to Berlin as a case officer working under Elliott’s friend Peter Lunn, tasked with recruiting Soviet intelligence officers as double agents. With his Egyptian blood and gift for languages, Blake was considered ideal material for a Middle East posting, and in 1960 he was enrolled in the Middle Eastern Centre for Arabic Studies, the language school in the hills outside Beirut, run by the Foreign Office. The centre offered intensive, eighteen-month courses in Arabic for diplomats, international businessmen, graduates and intelligence officers. The Lebanese regarded it as a spy school. With his sterling war record and his experience as a prisoner in North Korea, Blake was a minor celebrity in intelligence circles, and when the handsome young MI6 officer arrived in Beirut with his two sons and a pregnant wife, he was eagerly embraced by Anglo-American spy society.
Elliott considered George Blake ‘a most promising officer’ and a credit to the service, ‘a good-looking fellow, tall and with excellent manners and universally popular’. He was stunned, therefore, to receive a message from London in April informing him that Blake was a Soviet spy, who must be tricked into returning to Britain where he would be interrogated, arrested and tried for treason.
Blake had been ‘turned’ during his North Korean captivity. In detention, he had read the works of Karl Marx and found what he thought was truth. But ‘it was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses’ that triggered his whole-hearted conversion to communism: ‘I felt I was on the wrong side.’ British snobbery and prejudice may have played a part in his embrace of revolution, for, as a foreign-born Jew, Blake was never fully admitted to the MI6 club. ‘He doesn’t belong in the service,’ sniffed one colleague. Blake considered himself a ‘man of no class’, but in the long intelligence tradition, he had wanted to marry his secretary, Iris Peake, the upper-crust daughter of an Old Etonian Conservative MP. The relationship ran aground on the immovable British class system. ‘He was in love with her, but could not possibly marry her because of his circumstances,’ wrote his wife Gillian, who was also in MI6 (along with her father and sister). She believed the break-up had sharpened his resentment of the British establishment. In Berlin, Blake contacted the KGB, under the guise of recruiting spies within the Soviet service, and began passing over reams of top secret and highly damaging information, including details of numerous covert operations such as the Berlin Tunnel, a plot to eavesdrop on the Soviets from underground. At night he copied out Peter Lunn’s index cards, listing and identifying every MI6 spy in Germany. Blake betrayed an estimated 400 agents, sending an untold number to their deaths. Soon after his arrival in Beirut, Blake established contact with Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin, the KGB head of station, who gave him a telephone number to call in case of an emergency – a moment which was, though neither knew it, imminent.
Early in 1961, a Polish spy with a large moustache and an extravagant ego defected in Berlin. Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Goleniewski had been deputy head of military counter-intelligence and chief of the technical and scientific section of the Polish Intelligence Service. In the 1950s, he passed Polish secrets to the Soviets. Then in 1959, he began anonymously passing Polish and Soviet secrets to the CIA, which passed them on to MI6. Goleniewski was a fantasist (he would later claim to be the Tsarevich Alexei of Russia), but some of his intelligence was first-rate, including the revelation that a Soviet spy codenamed ‘Lambda’ was operating within British intelligence. And he had proof: copies of three MI6 documents that this spy had handed to his Soviet handlers. MI6 worked out that only ten people, in Warsaw and Berlin, could have had access to all three pieces of paper: one of them was George Blake. By the spring of 1961, MI6 was ‘ninety per cent sure’ that Blake was ‘Lambda’. Dick White sent a cable to Elliott, instructing him that Blake should be lured ‘to London immediately, on the pretext of discussing a future posting’. For once, Elliott did not tell his friend Kim Philby what was going on. The trap for George Blake was baited and set for Saturday 25 March.