Elliott was fishing: naming everybody he could think of who might have been in league with Philby, Burgess and Maclean. As Philby later noted, the list included ‘several names which alarmed me’, and his instinctive response was to mislead, to muddy the waters, to present black as white, or grey. According to Philby: ‘Blunt was in the clear but Tim Milne, who had loyally defended him for years, was not.’ Milne, of course, was entirely innocent and Blunt, entirely guilty. Elliott pressed him for more names, but Philby ‘claimed to know nothing’ about any other spies in the UK, and repeatedly insisted he had not been in contact with Soviet intelligence for fourteen years.
The exchange threw Philby’s predicament into sharp relief. MI6 would continue to squeeze him until every ounce of information had been extracted. He could never hope to hold them off with a partial confession. Blunt might already have admitted his guilt, in which case Elliott would know Philby’s insistence on his innocence was another lie. This time MI6 would not let up. Elliott had told him ‘the debriefing would be a long affair’, with the clear implication that Philby should expect to be wrung dry, forced into revealing everything he ‘knew about the KGB and naming names in Britain’. Whether he returned to London or stayed in Beirut, he would effectively be a prisoner of MI6; if he ever refused to cooperate, or was found to be lying, then the confession he had already signed could be used against him. ‘It became clear to me that my immunity could be withdrawn at any time,’ he later wrote. Elliott had told Philby that his signed confession ‘might stand him in good stead’ with the authorities in London; in fact, it gave Elliott the hold he needed. The ‘lifeline’ offered by Elliott was effectively a noose; the man who had been Philby’s protector for so long would now be his jailer. Philby’s options were running out, and both of them knew it.
The confrontation had lasted four days. Elliott told Philby that he would be leaving Beirut the next day, and travelling on to the Congo. Peter Lunn would take over the debriefing process in Beirut; London would send more questions; the Americans would want to talk to him; the process of interrogation was only just beginning. Back in London, the mood was jubilant. Dick White was ‘effusive in his gratitude’ to Elliott, convinced that Philby was playing ball. ‘He could have rejected the offer of immunity,’ White said. ‘But since he has accepted, he’ll stay and cooperate.’ The head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, decided to bring the FBI into the picture and wrote a soothing memo to J. Edgar Hoover:
In our judgement [Philby’s] statement of the association with the RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] is substantially true. It accords with all the available evidence in our possession and we have no evidence pointing to a continuation of his activities on behalf of the RIS after 1946, save in the isolated instance of Maclean. If this is so, it follows that damage to United States interests will have been confined to the period of the Second World War.
The chief FBI officer in London was invited to draw up a list of questions that Lunn should ask Philby when the debriefing resumed. ‘What makes you think he will still be there?’ the officer asked. ‘He will be,’ he was told. ‘He isn’t going anywhere.’ The CIA was not informed of developments in the Philby case. There would be plenty of time to fill in James Angleton later. As Elliott prepared to leave Beirut and hand over to Lunn, he reported that Philby was still unpredictable, in a nervous, drunken and depressed state: ‘He might, I suppose, commit suicide,’ he warned. Elliott no longer cared if his former friend lived or died. That, at least, was the impression he gave.
Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott shook hands and parted with one last display of their old amity. Ostensibly, they were back on the same side, working together after an unpleasant interlude, and friends once more. Both knew this was untrue.
Elliott’s decision to fly to Africa, leaving Philby unguarded in Beirut, was later condemned as a critical mistake, an act of egregious complacency that enabled Philby to pull off one last espionage coup. That is certainly how Philby and his KGB handlers chose to portray the ensuing events. But there is another, very different way to read Elliott’s actions. The prospect of prosecuting Philby in Britain was anathema to the intelligence services: another trial, so soon after the Blake fiasco, would be politically damaging and profoundly embarrassing. Blake was foreign and flaky, whereas Philby was an insider and, until very recently, a paid MI6 agent. He had already demonstrated his skill at handling the press. He knew far too much. Elliott was emphatic: ‘Nobody wanted him in London’. But keeping him in Beirut indefinitely was almost equally unpalatable. Once Philby was fully interrogated, what would be done with him? He plainly could no longer work for British newspapers, so would MI6 have to continue paying him? The prospect of subsidising a known traitor to prop up the bar of the Normandie Hotel did not appeal.
Elliott later claimed that the idea Philby might defect to the USSR had never occurred to him, or anyone else: ‘It just didn’t dawn on us.’ This defies belief. Burgess and Maclean had both defected; Blake would escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and make his way to Moscow. Elliott must have suspected that Philby would have a back-up escape plan. Moreover, he had deliberately forced him into a corner: Philby knew he now faced sustained interrogation, over a long period, at the hands of Peter Lunn, a man he found ‘unsympathetic’. Elliott had made it quite clear that if he failed to cooperate fully, the immunity deal was off and the confession he had already signed would be used against him. Burgess and Maclean had vanished into the Soviet Union, and were barely heard of again. Allowing Philby to join his friends in Moscow – to ‘do a fade’, in intelligence jargon – might be the tidiest solution all round.
Elliott could not have made it easier for Philby to flee, whether intentionally or otherwise. In defiance of every rule of intelligence, he left Beirut without making any provision for monitoring a man who had just confessed to being a double agent: Philby was not followed or watched; his flat was not placed under surveillance; his phone was not tapped; and MI6’s allies in the Lebanese security service were not alerted. He was left to his own devices, and told that Peter Lunn would be in touch in due course. Elliott simply walked away from Beirut, and left the door to Moscow wide open.
That was either monumentally stupid, or exceptionally clever.
The very next evening, on the stroke of six o’clock, Philby stood on the balcony of his flat on Rue Kantari, with a book in his hand.
See Notes on Chapter 18
19
The Fade
Philby and Petukhov met a few hours later in Vrej, the backstreet Armenian restaurant. It took Philby only a few rushed minutes to explain the situation: MI6 had new and damning information, from Golitsyn, and had offered him immunity in exchange for information. He did not tell his KGB handler that he had already confessed; instead, he allowed Petukhov to believe that he was holding out under questioning (as he had so often before) but would soon face another round of interrogation. Petukhov hurried back to the Soviet embassy and sent a cable to Vassili Dozhdalev, the head of the British desk at Moscow Centre, requesting instructions. Dozhdalev asked whether Philby could withstand another cross-examination. ‘Philby does not think he can escape again,’ Petukhov told him. Dozhdalev gave the order: Philby should be extracted from Beirut as soon as possible.