‘We need to discover what damage he caused,’ Dick White told Macmillan. ‘A full damage report with all the details of how the Russians had operated and who else was working with Philby is of great importance.’ Besides, though he might be a traitor, Philby ‘should be treated as a gentleman’. White sketched out a plan of action that would cause least embarrassment, while yielding maximum benefit: Arthur Martin should fly to Beirut as soon as possible, present Philby with the conclusive evidence against him, and then offer him a way out: immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession and complete cooperation. No such deal had been offered to George Blake; but then Blake, a foreigner, was not a gentleman. Macmillan agreed to the plan, but insisted on total secrecy: ‘Keep a lid on things,’ he instructed Dick White. The Attorney-General and the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office also approved the plan, though they were careful to commit nothing to paper. MI5 compiled a ‘voluminous brief in preparation for the confrontation’, which Martin studied as he prepared for the showdown in Beirut: he would break Philby, extract the truth, and destroy him once and for all. The only obstacle to this happy scenario was Nicholas Elliott.
Within days of his return to London, Elliott was summoned to see Dick White, and told, with some relish, that there could no longer be any doubt: Flora Solomon’s evidence confirmed that Philby had been a Soviet spy since the early 1930s. He had betrayed his country, his class and his club; he had lied to MI5 and MI6, the CIA and FBI, to his family, friends and colleagues; he had deceived everyone, egregiously, brilliantly, for more than thirty years. But no one had been betrayed more comprehensively than Nicholas Elliott.
Elliott had been just twenty-four, grieving over the death of Basil Fisher, when he was befriended and beguiled by Philby, a man he had then trusted, revered and supported throughout his adult life. Their lives had seemed to run in tandem, through public school, Cambridge and MI6, overlapping professionally, culturally and geographically. From St Albans to Istanbul, Elliott had modelled himself on Philby: his spycraft, his air of worldly irony, his umbrella with the ebony handle. They seldom discussed their fears, or hopes, for theirs was a most English friendship, founded on cricket, alcohol and jokes, based on a shared set of assumptions about the world, and their privileged place in it. They were as close as two heterosexual, upper-class, mid-century Englishmen could be. Elliott’s loyalty was of the military type, an unquestioning readiness to stand by a comrade under fire: he had valued this friendship forged in wartime above all else. Now, for the first time, he began to count its cost, to wonder how many people he, James Angleton and others had unwittingly condemned to death. Some of the victims had names: the German anti-communist Catholics identified by the Vermehrens; the Volkovs in Istanbul; the young Georgians slipped across the Turkish border to their deaths; perhaps even Buster Crabb’s strange death could be attributed to Philby. Many casualties remain nameless: the multiple agents infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain, and never seen again; the Albanian ‘pixies’, captured and killed in their hundreds, along with their families; the unknown number of agents exposed in the Middle East. Elliott would never be able to calculate the precise death tally, for who can remember every conversation, every confidence exchanged with a friend stretching back three decades? The weekends at the cricket, the evenings at the club, the nights on the town in Beirut: it had all been a charade, the simulacrum of comradeship, while Philby gathered information for his Soviet masters. Elliott had given away almost every secret he had to Philby; but Philby had never given away his own.
Elliott’s emotions on discovering Philby’s betrayal can only be surmised, for he preferred not to discuss them. His upper lip remained ramrod stiff. He came from a generation of Englishmen who believed that feelings are a sign of weakness, to be suppressed, ignored or laughed off. A different sort of man might have buckled under the pain, but Elliott was tough, and a dissembler in his own way, for British breeding and schooling produce a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty. As John le Carré once wrote, the privately educated Englishman ‘is the greatest dissembler on earth . . . Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool . . . He can have a Force Twelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue and you may be his best friend but you’ll never be the wiser.’ Elliott had survived a brutal prep school, the chilliness of his father, the death of his first friend, by pretending that everything was perfectly all right. And he survived Philby’s intimate betrayal in exactly the same way. But those who knew him best saw that beneath the ever-languid manner, the armoury of jokes and the insouciant air, from the moment he finally understood and accepted Philby’s treachery, Elliott’s world changed utterly: inside, he was crushed, humiliated, enraged and saddened. For the rest of his life, he would never cease to wonder how a man to whom he had felt so close, and so similar in every way, had been, underneath, a fraud. Once, he would have died for Philby; now, as he told his son, he would ‘happily have killed him’. Philby had made a first-class fool of him and a mockery of their lifelong friendship; he had broken every canon of clubmanship and fraternity, and caused incalculable damage to the service, and the country, that Elliott loved. Elliott needed to know why. He wanted to look Philby in the eye one last time. He wanted to understand.
Elliott demanded to be allowed to confront Philby himself. He had known him more than half his life, and if anyone could extract a confession from the man, it was surely he. The idea appealed to Dick White. Elliott’s righteous anger might lend him additional moral weight, and ‘there was more chance that Philby could be persuaded to confess by an outraged sympathiser than by a stiff, lower-middle-class MI5 officer’. White calculated that since Elliott had been ‘Philby’s greatest supporter in 1951, his anger at having been betrayed would suggest that we had more proof than he realised’. In the past, White had been nettled by Elliott’s support for Philby, but he considered him ‘a proficient, clever and determined officer who would stop at nothing if the interests of the Crown required’. It was agreed: Elliott would fly out to Beirut, and nail Philby. The CIA was not informed about the proof of Philby’s guilt, or the decision to have Elliott confront him. The Americans could be informed once the case had been resolved. If James Angleton found out what was going on, he would certainly demand some involvement. The decision was made to keep him in the dark. Some wondered whether Elliott would be able to restrain his anger if he was allowed in the same room as the friend who had cheated him so thoroughly, but ‘Elliott swore not to exceed his brief, coldly angry though he now was’.
Peter Wright described the reaction inside MI5 to the news that MI6 was sending not the dogged Arthur Martin to confront Philby, but one of their own tribe.