Elliott did his best to calm Eleanor, without giving away what he knew. ‘There is no question that she was deeply in love with him and had no suspicion that he was a traitor to his country,’ Elliott wrote. Philby had disappeared ‘in circumstances calculated to do her maximum hurt’, but Elliott could not yet bring himself to reveal to Eleanor that Philby was a Soviet spy who had lied to her throughout their marriage, just as he had lied to Aileen throughout his previous marriage, and to Elliott himself throughout their friendship. Yet he hinted at the truth: ‘You do realise that your husband was not an ordinary man?’ he told her. She would find out just how extraordinary soon enough.
A few weeks later, a scruffy stranger knocked on the door of the apartment in the Rue Kantari, thrust an envelope into Eleanor’s hand, and disappeared back down the stairwell. The envelope contained a three-page typewritten letter, signed ‘with love from Kim’, instructing her to buy a plane ticket for London to throw any watchers off the scent, and then secretly go to the Czech airlines office and buy another ticket for Prague. Then she should go to the alleyway opposite the house, leading to the sea, ‘choose a spot high up on the wall, towards the right’ and write, in white chalk, the exact date and time of the flight to Prague. Philby instructed her to burn the letter after reading. Eleanor was deeply suspicious, and distraught, ‘convinced that Kim had been kidnapped’, and that she was being lured into a trap. In fact, Philby’s plan to get Eleanor to join him was genuine, if unworkable: the press had by now picked up the story of his mysterious disappearance, her movements were being watched, and the idea that Eleanor could blithely walk onto a plane and fly to Czechoslovakia was ludicrously impractical. After some indecision, she told Elliott about the letter, who instructed her ‘on no account to meet any strangers outside the house’. Elliott then crept up the alleyway and chalked a date and flight time on the wall, ‘to test the system and cause confusion in the enemy ranks’. It was the first thrust in a peculiar duel across the Iron Curtain.
The news of Philby’s defection tore like brushfire through the intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic, provoking shock, embarrassment and furious recrimination. Philby’s defenders in MI6 were stunned, and his detractors in MI5 enraged that he had been allowed to escape. In the CIA there was baffled dismay at what was seen as yet another British intelligence disaster. Hoover was livid. ‘Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard,’ wrote one MI5 officer. ‘To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed away, and the dark ages began.’ Arthur Martin, the officer originally slated to confront Philby in Beirut, was apoplectic: ‘We should have sent a team out there and grilled him while we had the chance.’ The belief that Philby must have been tipped off by another Soviet spy within British intelligence took root within MI5, prompting a mole-hunt that would continue for years, sowing paranoia and distrust into every corner of the organisation. Even Elliott came under investigation. Arthur Martin was detailed to grill him: ‘But after lengthy interrogation Elliott just convinced his interrogator that he was in the clear.’
Desmond Bristow, Philby’s protégé back in St Albans who had risen steadily through MI6 ranks, was stunned by the news: ‘He had been my boss and in many ways my teacher on the ways of espionage. I could not bring myself to think of him as a Soviet agent. Philby’s defection turned into a perennial cloud of doubt hanging over the present, the past, and the future.’ Dick White was said to have reacted with ‘horror’ to the news. ‘I never thought he would accept the offer of immunity and then skip the country,’ he said. To Elliott he confided: ‘What a shame we reopened it all. Just trouble.’ White may have been genuinely astounded by events, or he may simply have been playing a part. Philby’s defection might be embarrassing, but it had also solved a problem. C’s colleagues noted that while he professed surprise at Philby’s vanishing act, White, the head of MI6, did not seem unduly ‘disappointed’.
To Elliott fell the delicate, and exceedingly unpleasant, task of breaking the news to James Angleton. The FBI knew about the confrontation in Beirut and Philby’s confession, but the CIA had been kept entirely in the dark. ‘I tried to repair the damage by telephoning Jim Angleton,’ Elliott later said, ‘but it was too late.’ Angleton was publicly incensed, and privately mortified. Like Elliott, he now had to ‘face the awful truth and acknowledge that his British friend, hero, and mentor had been a senior KGB agent’. This master spy had been taken in by a spy far more adept than he. The long liquid lunches, the secrets spilled so easily more than a decade earlier, the death and disappearance of so many agents sent to make secret war in the Soviet bloc; it had all been part of a brutal game, which Philby had won, hands down. The impact of that traumatic discovery would have far-reaching consequences for America and the world. In the short term, Angleton set about doctoring the record, putting it about that he had always suspected Philby, had kept him under surveillance, and would have trapped him but for British incompetence – fictions that he would propagate and cling to, obsessively, for the rest of his life. But the truth was in the files. Each of the thirty-six meetings Philby attended at CIA headquarters between 1949 and 1951 had been typed up in a separate memo by Angleton’s secretary Gloria Loomis; every one of the discussions at Harvey’s restaurant was carefully recorded. Everything that Angleton had ever told Philby, and thus the precise human and political cost of their friendship, was on paper, stored in an archive under the direct control of the chief of CIA counter-intelligence, James Angleton. Years later, the CIA conducted an internal search for these files: every single one has vanished. ‘I had them burned,’ Angleton told MI5 officer Peter Wright. ‘It was all very embarrassing.’
Philby’s former friends and colleagues found themselves combing back over the years they had known him, searching for clues. The more candid among them acknowledged they had never suspected him. Others claimed that they had doubted his loyalty since the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Still others now claimed that they had always seen through him, proving that the least trustworthy people are those who claim to have seen it all coming, after it has all come. The most honest admitted that Philby’s ruthless charm had seduced them utterly. Glen Balfour-Paul, whose dinner party Philby skipped on the night he vanished, wrote: ‘He was an unforgivable traitor to his country, responsible among much else for the assassination by his Soviet associates of many brave men. All I can say is that in the half of him that I knew (the deceitful half, of course) he was a most enjoyable friend.’