Philby was now on his feet, and making for the door. The tea party was over.
‘If you cooperate, we will give you immunity from prosecution. Nothing will be published.’
The door was now open.
‘You’ve been a lucky chap so far, Kim. You have exactly twenty-four hours. Be back here at precisely 4 p.m. tomorrow. If you’re as intelligent as I think you are, you’ll accept.’
Philby’s reply, if he made one, was not picked up by the hidden microphone.
‘I’m offering you a lifeline, Kim . . .’
The door closed behind him.
*
Philby’s parting silence was itself an admission. ‘He never once asked what the new evidence was.’ He was no longer protesting. He would seize the lifeline. ‘Kim’s broken,’ Elliott told Lunn. ‘Everything’s OK,’ and that evening, he dashed off a reassuring telegram to Dick White in London. Inside, however, he was deeply anxious. Would Philby come back? Would he cooperate, clam up, or try to escape? ‘The next twenty-four hours were a testing time.’
The next day, on the stroke of four, Philby reappeared at the apartment. He seemed sober and composed.
‘OK, here’s the scoop,’ he said. ‘But first you owe me a drink. I haven’t had one since my birthday on New Year’s Day.’
Elliott poured two large brandies.
Philby then launched into a prepared speech, a peculiar confection of truth, half-truth and lies. He said that he had been recruited into the Soviet secret service by his first wife, Litzi (which was not exactly true), and that he had, in turn, recruited Maclean and Burgess (which was). From his pocket he drew two sheets of paper, on which he had typed a sanitised, incomplete account of his work for Moscow, with few details and fewer names. He admitted he had been recruited by the Soviet intelligence service in 1934, but claimed that he had stopped working for Moscow immediately after the war, having ‘seen the error of his ways’. Yes, he had tipped off Maclean in 1951, but merely as an act of loyalty to a friend, not as one active spy protecting another. He listed his early KGB handlers, but made no mention of the Soviet intelligence officers he had dealt with in Istanbul, Washington, London and Beirut.
‘Is Nedosekin your contact?’ asked Elliott, referring to the KGB station chief who had handled George Blake before his capture and arrest.
‘I’ve got no bloody contact,’ lied Philby, with a show of irritation. ‘I broke contact with the KGB.’
Elliott knew Philby was withholding. The two-page summary was a ‘very bland document’ that admitted spying within a narrow timeframe. It was, Elliott knew, a ‘limited confession’, but it was nonetheless a signed admission of guilt, admissible in a court of law, and a document that transformed the game. Philby had acknowledged being a Soviet spy, and more disclosures would surely follow. By implication he had accepted the deal in principle, and a negotiation was under way: his liberty in exchange for information. MI6 now held a signed confession, however partial. He would never be able to row back from here. Elliott had the upper hand.
But what was Philby up to? The question is hard to answer, because Philby himself never told the whole truth about his own intentions. He would later claim he had been merely playing for time, toying with Elliott, controlling the situation with ‘just a little stalling, just a little drinking’, while he made his plans. His behaviour suggests otherwise. Philby was in turmoil, trapped, tempted by Elliott’s offer, and acutely conscious that his future depended on how he played the game. How much could he get away with concealing? Would MI6 honour the deal? If he said too much, would he end up hanging himself? Was Elliott his friend still, or his nemesis?
Elliott demanded answers. With Philby’s confession in hand, he began to increase the pressure. ‘Our promise of immunity and pardon depends wholly on whether you give us all the information that you have. First of all we need information on people who worked with Moscow. By the way, we know them.’ This was partly bluff, of course, but Philby could not know that. How much did Elliott know? Had Anthony Blunt cracked? Was he deploying the old interrogator’s trick, by asking questions to which he already had answers? For two hours they drank and duelled, until the sun was setting and the sound of the muezzin drifted over Beirut. In the language of the sport they both loved, Elliott bowled and Philby batted, padding up, stonewalling, leaving the ball, trying to stay at the crease and knowing that the next delivery could end his long, long innings. Listening to the tape recording many months later, Peter Wright heard Elliott ‘trying his manful best to corner a man for whom deception had been a second skin for thirty years’. The game was finely balanced, a brutal fight to the death conducted in tones of perfect English civility played out to a gently drunken tempo. ‘By the end, they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers, their warm, classical public school accents discussing the greatest treachery of the twentieth century.’
Rising to leave, Philby suggested dinner at his flat that evening. Eleanor knew Elliott was in Beirut, and if he failed to pay a visit she would wonder why. Elliott agreed to come after he had sent another report to Dick White in London. White’s response was encouraging; Philby was ‘finally broken’, and Elliott should continue the interrogation. When Elliott arrived at the Rue Kantari a few hours later, he found Philby passed out on the floor, having consumed an entire bottle of whisky. Not for the first time, Elliott and Eleanor carried him to bed. They chatted for a while afterwards. Elliott did his best to act normally, but Eleanor was no fool. Why, she asked, was he staying in an ‘obscure hotel’? Elliott replied that ‘he did not want too many people to know he was around’. Eleanor had come to like Elliott, and ‘this furtiveness was not characteristic’.
Elliott called the next morning, and invited the Philbys to dinner at Chez Temporel, one of Beirut’s most fashionable and expensive restaurants. He would be bringing his former secretary to make up a foursome. The charade of normality would be maintained. Elliott chose a quiet, candlelit corner table. The food was good – steak au poivre vert and Syrian truffle salad – the view through the white arches over the sea was enchanting, and the conversation unmemorable. Both Philby and Elliott tried to act ‘as if nothing had intervened to destroy an old and treasured friendship’. It was almost like old times. Yet Eleanor was uneasy. Kim was visibly anxious, and Elliott’s behaviour was distinctly odd.
His greatest passion was telling naughty stories. He always had one up his sleeve. This was the way he loosened up at parties. But behind the jokes was a keen professional mind. As usual one doubtful joke followed another, but I had a clear feeling the gaiety was false. Something was going on between them that was escaping me . . . Here was a man, a very old friend from Kim’s past, whom I thought I could confide in. Kim got up to go to the lavatory, and I was on the verge of saying to Elliott: ‘Something is worrying Kim terribly. What the hell is going on?’
But before she could do so, Elliott also excused himself, and followed Philby into the restaurant toilets. Over the urinals, Philby handed over a sheaf of typewritten pages, perhaps eight or nine in all, the second instalment of his confession, and much fuller than the first. Philby was producing the goods.
The following day, Philby and Elliott met once more. This time, Elliott brought his own paperwork: a single sheet of paper on which was written a list of names, perhaps a dozen in all. Elliott passed it over. Which of these individuals were Soviet spies? Two of those named were Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, the Fourth and Fifth Men in the Cambridge network; both had been under investigation ever since the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Another on the list was Tim Milne (Philby’s old school friend and the witness at his wedding to Eleanor) who was now an MI6 officer in the Far East. The other names are unknown, but Philby’s friend Tomás Harris was surely on the list, along with Guy Liddell, who had left MI5 under a cloud because of his association with Burgess and Blunt.