The few of us inside MI5 privy to this decision were appalled. It was not simply a matter of chauvinism, though, not unnaturally, that played a part. We in MI5 had never doubted Philby’s guilt from the beginning, and now at last we had the evidence needed to corner him. Philby’s friends in MI6, Elliott chief among them, had continually protested his innocence. Now, when the proof was inescapable, they wanted to keep it in-house. The choice of Elliott rankled strongly.
To strengthen Elliott’s hand, Dick White told him that new evidence had been obtained from the defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, although exactly what he revealed remains a matter of conjecture, and some mystery. Golitsyn had not specifically identified Philby as ‘Agent Stanley’, but White gave Elliott the impression that he had. Was this intentional sleight of hand by White, allowing Elliott to believe that the evidence against Philby was stronger than it really was? Or did Elliott interpret as hard fact something that had only been implied? Either way, he prepared for his trip to Beirut in the certainty that Philby was bang to rights: ‘We’d fully penetrated the KGB, so we had confirmation.’ Elliott’s instructions were verbal, and only two men knew what they were: Dick White, and Nicholas Elliott himself.
In Beirut, Eleanor Philby watched in despair as her once-charming husband fell apart in a miasma of drink and depression. Philby was ‘vertically intoxicated, horizontally intoxicated’, and often intoxicated in solitude. ‘It was as if our flat was the only place he felt safe.’ When he did venture out for social events, he invariably ended up insensible. To her deep embarrassment he had to be bodily carried out of an embassy party. ‘He only had to smell a drink to set him off. His depression never seemed to lift,’ wrote Eleanor, who ‘groped to understand his tension and remoteness’. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked him repeatedly. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Oh nothing, nothing,’ he would reply.
Looking back, she realised that Philby’s desperate drinking, his search for alcoholic oblivion, was the mark of a man living in dread.
Philby’s journalism dried to a trickle. Peter Lunn noticed that Philby’s hands shook when they met for the first time. Philby insisted that if they should ever encounter each other at a social event, they should pretend to be strangers – a precaution that Lunn considered bizarre and unnecessary. After Elliott’s warmth, Eleanor found Lunn a ‘very cold fish indeed’.
On New Year’s Eve, Philby refused to go to any of the numerous Beirut parties on offer, and instead sat drinking champagne with Eleanor on the balcony of the flat, in gloomy silence. The next day was his fifty-first birthday, and Eleanor had planned a small midday drinks party. By 2.30, the guests had left. The Philbys intended to spend the day quietly at home, but then Miles Copeland appeared: ‘He dragged us protesting to an all-day New Year party given by some Americans.’ Philby had ‘already had a good deal to drink’, and became steadily drunker. As night fell, they staggered home to the Rue Kantari. Eleanor was preparing for bed, when she heard a loud crash from the bathroom, a cry of pain, and then another crash. Philby had fallen over, smashed his head on the radiator, lurched to his feet, and fallen again. ‘He was bleeding profusely from two great gashes on the crown of his head. The whole bathroom was spattered with blood.’ Eleanor wrapped his head in a towel, and rushed frantically to the telephone. Philby, dazed and still drunk, refused to leave the flat. Finally, a Lebanese doctor arrived and declared: ‘If we don’t get your husband to the hospital I will not be responsible for his life.’ Philby was coaxed into the lift and driven to the American University hospital, where he was stitched up and sedated. A doctor took Eleanor aside and told her gravely that with ‘one more ounce of alcohol in his blood, he would have been dead’.
Philby insisted on returning home that night. He cut a pathetic figure, in a blood-stained dressing gown, with two livid black eyes and a turban of bandages around his head. ‘I was a bloody fool,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going on the wagon – forever.’
A week later, Nick Elliott broke the journey to Beirut in Athens, where he met Halsey Colchester, the MI6 station chief, and his wife Rozanne, valued friends from Istanbul days. Elliott had already ‘prepared himself for a battle of wits he was determined to win’, but he needed to unburden himself before heading on to Beirut. ‘I’ve got an awful task,’ he told Halsey and Rozanne. ‘I’ve got to beard him.’ Like Elliott, the Colchesters had long admired and defended Philby, and they were stunned by the proof of his guilt. ‘It was a terrible shock to hear he was this awful spy. He was always so nice, so affable and intelligent.’
Rozanne had known Elliott as a carefree spirit – ‘he always laughed about things’ – but over dinner in Athens, he was deadly serious, anxious and anguished. Rozanne’s account of that night is a picture of a man facing the worst moment of his life.
Nicholas knew he had blood on his hands. He knew Philby so well, and he was horrified by the whole thing. He said he wouldn’t mind shooting him. He didn’t know what he was going to say, and I remember him coaching himself: ‘There’s no pretending now. We know who you are.’ Nick was usually a very funny man. Like an actor or entertainer, you never felt he was quite real. One never really felt one knew him. Nicholas had that English way of not getting too involved, a sort of façade with endless jokes. But that night he was very highly strung. He was dreading it, and it was quite dangerous. He thought he might have been shot by Philby, or the Soviets. ‘I hope he doesn’t take a pot shot,’ he said. He talked obsessively about Philby, about how he had known him so well. He didn’t have to go through the ordeal, but he wanted to. It was really quite brave. He wanted to make sure for himself.
Elliott arrived in Beirut on 10 January 1963, and checked into a small, discreet hotel, far from the usual haunts of the spies and journalists. Only Peter Lunn knew he was in the city. Together they prepared the ground for the confrontation. Lunn’s secretary had an apartment in the Christian quarter, near the sea. The sitting room was carefully bugged by an MI6 technician with a hidden microphone under the sofa, and a wire running to a tape-recorder in the next-door room. Elliott bought a bottle of brandy. When everything was ready, Lunn telephoned Philby and ‘in a casual voice’ suggested ‘a meeting between himself and Philby to discuss future plans’. He gave no hint that anything was amiss. Since Philby had himself stressed the need for security, Lunn suggested meeting over tea at his secretary’s flat, where they could chat in private. Philby had barely left the Rue Kantari since his drunken fall on New Year’s Day, but he agreed to meet Lunn at the appointed address the following afternoon. He later told Eleanor: ‘The minute that call came through, I knew the balloon was up.’
At four o’clock on 12 January, Philby, his head still swathed in bandages, and a little unsteady on his feet, climbed the stairs and knocked on the apartment door.
When it was opened by Nicholas Elliott, Philby seemed strangely unsurprised. ‘I rather thought it would be you,’ he said.
See Notes on Chapter 17
18
Teatime
Philby’s reaction to Elliott’s unannounced arrival in Beirut was interpreted, in the more paranoia-prone parts of MI5, as evidence that he had been tipped off in advance. It sparked a hunt for another Soviet spy within British intelligence that lasted two decades, and a conspiracy theory that still smoulders today. In reality, when Philby said he was not surprised to find Elliott waiting for him at the flat, he was stating a fact. He had feared exposure for years, and expected it imminently; he knew how Elliott’s mind worked, and he knew that if the truth about his spying had finally emerged, then Elliott would want to confront him with it.