Miles Copeland was ‘dumbfounded’ by Philby’s ‘unbelievable’ defection, concluding: ‘He was the best actor in the world’ – a reaction that rather undermines his later claim to have kept Philby under surveillance, on Angleton’s orders, during the Beirut years. Copeland had been duped like everyone else, and offered a clear-eyed assessment of the damage inflicted by the KGB’s most effective spy: ‘What Philby provided was feedback about the CIA’s reactions. They [the KGB] could accurately determine whether or not reports fed to the CIA were believed or not . . . what it comes to, is that when you look at the whole period from 1944 to 1951, the entire Western intelligence effort, which was pretty big, was what you might call minus advantage. We’d have been better off doing nothing.’
In March 1963, under intense pressure from the media, the British government was forced to acknowledge that Philby was missing. Three months later, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, issued a statement, declaring: ‘Since Mr Philby resigned from the Foreign Service in 1951, twelve years ago, he has had no access of any kind to any official information.’ That same month, Philby was granted Soviet citizenship. ‘Hello, Mr Philby’ ran the headline in Izvestia, the official Soviet newspaper, accompanied by a sketch of the defector in Pushkin Square. And so began the Great Philby Myth: the super-spy who had bamboozled Britain, divulged her secrets and those of her allies for thirty years, and then escaped to Moscow in a final triumphant coup de théâtre, leaving the wrong-footed dupes of MI6 wringing their hands in dismay. That myth, occasionally spruced up by Russian propaganda and eagerly propagated by Philby himself, has held firm ever since.
But there were some to whom the story of Philby’s daring night-time getaway did not quite ring true. ‘Philby was allowed to escape,’ wrote Desmond Bristow. ‘Perhaps he was even encouraged. To have brought him back to England and convicted as a traitor would have been even more embarrassing; and when they convicted him, could they really have hanged him?’ That view was echoed in Moscow. Yuri Modin, the canny Soviet case officer, wrote: ‘To my mind the whole business was politically engineered. The British government had nothing to gain by prosecuting Philby. A major trial, to the inevitable accompaniment of spectacular revelation and scandal, would have shaken the British establishment to its foundations.’ Far from being caught out by Philby’s defection, ‘the secret service had actively encouraged him to slip away’, wrote Modin. Many in the intelligence world believed that by leaving the door open to Moscow and then walking away, Elliott had deliberately forced Philby into exile. And they may have been right.
Divining Elliott’s precise motives is impossible, because for the next thirty years he carefully obscured and muddied them. To some, he played the role of the sucker, describing Philby’s flight as a shock, and claiming that the possibility of defection had never occurred to him. But to others, he gave the opposite impression: that he was entirely unsurprised by Philby’s flight, because he had engineered it. In a book written years later under KGB supervision, Philby depicted his defection as the heroic checkmate move of the grandmaster: ‘I knew exactly how to handle it,’ he wrote. ‘How could they have stopped me?’ The answer: very easily. Simply posting a Watcher on Rue Kantari would have made it all but impossible for Philby to flee. But no such effort was made. As Modin wrote, ‘spiriting Philby out of Lebanon was child’s play’, because Elliott and MI6 had made it so easy – suspiciously easy, in Modin’s mind.
There are two, diametrically opposed interpretations of Philby’s flight to Moscow: according to the first, Philby was the virtuoso spy, and Elliott the fool; according to the second, those roles were reversed. Under the first scenario, Philby took the decision, waited until British intelligence was looking the other way, and ran. The ease of his defection, he wrote, was the result of British blundering, ‘a mistake, simple stupidity’. This version of events requires the assumption that MI6 was not merely inefficient and naive, but quite astonishingly dim. A second, more plausible story goes like this: Elliott successfully extracted the confession that ensured Philby was now under MI6 control; he made it crystal clear that Philby’s continued liberty was dependent on his continued cooperation; then, perhaps with the connivance of Dick White, he stepped away, spread the rumour that Lunn had gone skiing, and allowed Philby to believe the coast was clear, the road to Moscow wide open.
Among those who thought that Elliott, and not Philby, had won the last round, was Kim Philby himself. He left Beirut thinking he had jumped; only later did Philby come to believe that he had been pushed.
*
Kim Philby was welcomed to Moscow by the KGB, given a thorough medical examination, and installed in a flat, luxurious by Soviet standards. A minder was appointed to guard him. He was given a salary of about £200 a month, and a promise that his children would be financially supported back in Britain. The KGB agreed to bring furniture and furnishings from Beirut, including an oak table given to him by Tommy Harris. Two of his favourite pipes were purchased in Jermyn Street, and shipped to Moscow in the diplomatic bag. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were both living in Moscow, although they had by now fallen out, partly as a result of an incident during which a drunken Burgess had urinated in the fireplace of the Chinese embassy. The spy’s circumstances had changed, but his habits not at all. In the summer of 1963, he died of liver failure, leaving Philby his 4,000-book library. Philby did not see him before he died, though he later claimed that he had been prevented from doing so by his Russian handlers. ‘Burgess was a bit of an embarrassment here,’ he told the journalist Phillip Knightley. Philby had books, his pipes, furniture and rugs; now he wanted his wife.
In May, four months after Philby’s disappearance, Eleanor Philby flew to London. The press was now rampaging all over the story of the defection of the Third Man, and lying in wait for her. A few weeks earlier an ‘unmistakably Russian’ man had appeared at her door, and declared, ‘I’m from Kim. He wants you to join him. I’m here to help.’ She refused the offer, reported it to Elliott, and arrived in Britain in a state of utter confusion, still uncertain where her husband was, and not knowing whether to believe the stories about his espionage and defection.
Nicholas Elliott sent a car to pick her up from the airport to escape the press. He found her a doctor to treat a swollen ankle, and then, once she was back on her feet, took her out to lunch. When Eleanor brought up the subject of reuniting with Philby, Elliott was insistent: ‘Kim was an active communist agent and [she] should on no account contemplate going to Moscow.’ He warned her: ‘They probably won’t let you out, if you go.’ Eleanor was struck, once again, by Elliott’s ‘surprising tenderness’, but was still reluctant to accept that her husband was a Soviet spy. Elliott offered to summon the head of MI6 himself, in order to persuade her. Dick White appeared within the hour, and Elliott installed them together in the sitting room of Wilton Street with coffee and a bottle of brandy. White was courteous, adamant, and only slightly untruthful. ‘We have definitely known for the last seven years that Kim has been working for the Russians without pay,’ he said. White had suspected Philby for far longer than that, but had discovered clear-cut proof of his guilt less than a year earlier. By the end of the afternoon, Eleanor Philby was in floods of tears, woozy on sedatives and brandy, but finally convinced that her husband was indeed a spy. She had been, in her words, ‘the victim of a prolonged and monstrous confidence trick’, yet she was still determined to join the conman in Moscow.
In September she received another letter from Kim: ‘All I am thinking of now is seeing you.’ Elliott did everything he could to dissuade her from going. One day he bought her a ticket to see Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, in which a community is attacked by avian marauders. ‘I don’t know what he had in mind, except perhaps to demoralise me,’ she later wrote. This was, perhaps, Elliott’s way of warning Eleanor that a life that seems calm and secure can swiftly turn to nightmare. She was unmoved, and a few days later found herself in the office of the smiling Soviet consul, who told her to be ready to fly to Moscow in two days, before handing over £500 in cash: ‘Buy yourself some very warm clothes.’