When Eleanor announced she was leaving, Elliott mobilised his own wife in a last-ditch attempt to get her to see sense.
‘What would you do if the man you loved went behind the Iron Curtain?’ Eleanor asked Elizabeth, as they drank tea.
The idea of Nicholas Elliott defecting to the USSR was so preposterous that Elizabeth found it hard not to laugh. But as Eleanor wrote later, ‘she finally admitted that she would do the same thing I was planning to do’.
Elliott feared that Eleanor might be trapped for ever in Russia, and believed that any attempt to resume her marriage to Philby was doomed. Yet he could not help admiring her bravery, and the ‘passionate loyalty and devotion’ that the betrayer could still inspire. ‘Although I had put the fear of God into her she was determined to return to Moscow and have it out with him. She left the next day.’
Eleanor flew to Moscow on 26 September 1963, and landed at the airport disguised in a turban and dark glasses. Philby and his minder were waiting. ‘Eleanor, is that you?’ he said.
*
Late one night, a few weeks later, Elliott heard a soft thump as a letter, delivered by hand, dropped into the letter box at 13 Wilton Street. Inside was a typewritten letter, and an empty envelope addressed to Kim Philby at PO Box 509, Central Post Office, Moscow. The letter carried no postmark, date or letterhead, but the handwriting was unmistakable.
Dear Nick,
I wonder if this letter will surprise you. Our last transactions were so strange that I cannot help thinking that perhaps you wanted me to do a fade.
I am more than thankful for your friendly interventions at all times. I would have got in touch with you earlier, but I thought it better to let time do its work on the case.
It is invariably with pleasure that I remember our meetings and talks. They did much to help one get one’s bearings in this complicated world! I deeply appreciate, now as ever, our old friendship, and I hope that rumours which have reached me about your having had some trouble on my account, are exaggerated.
It would be bitter to feel that I might have been a source of trouble to you, but I am buoyed up by my confidence that you will have found a way out of any difficulties that may have beset you.
I have often thought that there are a number of questions connected with the whole story that might interest you, and it might be helpful all round if we could get together as in old times and discuss matters of mutual interest. After careful thought, I have come to the conclusion that Helsinki, which you could reach without difficulty, would be a suitable rendezvous – or perhaps Berlin?
I am enclosing an unsealed, addressed envelope. In the event of your agreeing to my proposal, would you post it, enclosing some view of Tower Bridge? On receipt of your letter, I will write again, through the same channel, and make suggestions about the admin. side of the rendezvous.
As you have probably guessed, I am sending this letter by ‘safe hand’ to your private address for obvious reasons. You will, of course, treat this as a wholly private communication concerning only our two selves. At least, I hope you will see your way to follow my advice in this matter.
Guy’s death was a bitter blow. He had been very ill for a long time, and only his ox-like constitution enabled him to live as long as he did. What a pity we shall never be able to gather à trois at Pruniers!
Let me hear from you soon.
Love to Elizabeth (to whom by the way, you had better not disclose the contents of this letter – nor to anyone else of course).
Elliott was astonished. Philby wrote as if his betrayal had been no more than a hiccup in their long friendship. It was as if Vermehren, Volkov, the pixies and the countless others betrayed to their deaths had never existed. Was he trying to lure Elliott into a trap? Or was this an attempt to persuade him to turn double agent, to change his bearings in this ‘complicated world’? The sending of a blank postcard of Tower Bridge would convey a message that the KGB could interpret: was this intended to show that Philby was acting without KGB approval, and therefore a hint that he was prepared to be reeled back in, to ‘discuss matters of mutual interest’? Elliott’s initial reaction was one of outrage. ‘It was ridiculous to suppose that I would agree to meet him behind the backs of my boss and my wife.’ The old Philby charm, laced with bravado, was there in abundance, with its allusion to their valued friendship, and the hope that he had not damaged his friend’s career. Elliott decided that the letter must be ‘an incredibly clumsy piece of KGB disinformation, obviously designed to throw doubts on my loyalty’. The next morning he took the letter in to MI6 headquarters, and showed it to Dick White, who was equally intrigued. The strange missive prompted ‘many hours of discussion as to what, if anything, should be done about it’. Elliott was in favour of setting up a meeting, ‘because first, I was certainly fitter than he was, and secondly because I could choose the rendezvous’. He was overruled.
The key to Philby’s intentions may lie in the first line of the letter. He wanted to know, once and for all, whether Elliott had deliberately cornered him into defecting. Trading once more on their friendship, he hoped to find out if, in the end, he had really won the battle of manipulation, whether he had outmanoeuvred Elliott, or the other way round.
Elliott did not give him that satisfaction, but he did send back a last, unmistakably barbed message, a blunt reference to just one ‘tragic episode’ among so many, and just one of the many people Philby had destroyed, an epitaph for a friendship brutally betrayed: ‘Put some flowers for me on poor Volkov’s grave.’
See Notes on Chapter 19
20
Three Old Spies
Kim Philby did not love Moscow, and Moscow did not love him, though both tried to pretend otherwise. Philby may have believed, back in 1934, that he was joining an ‘elite’ force, but found he had no KGB rank, and little to do. In Russian eyes, he was an agent, not an officer, and one of little further use. He was welcomed, thanked, debriefed and rewarded; but he was never quite trusted. The ease with which he had escaped from Beirut may have rekindled doubts long dormant in Moscow, the uneasy, queasy suspicion that he might yet be double-crossing the KGB. Yuri Modin found him unreadable: ‘He never revealed his true self. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves ever managed to pierce the armour of mystery that clad him . . . in the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.’ A KGB minder accompanied him everywhere, ostensibly as protection against possible British retaliation, but also as guard, and jailer. He remained, in the words of one KGB officer, an ‘Englishman to his fingertips’, and therefore innately suspect. In Britain, Philby had been too British to be doubted; in Russia, he was too British to be believed.
When Philby’s copies of The Times arrived in Moscow, usually weeks after publication, he carefully ironed them, and then pored over accounts of cricket matches long since over. He ate thick-cut Oxford marmalade on his toast, sipped imported English tea, and listened to the BBC World Service every evening at seven. When his children visited from the West, they brought Marmite, Worcestershire sauce, and spices for the Indian meals he liked to cook. He wore a tweed jacket in hound’s-tooth check, and a woollen tie. He drank Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky, often obliteratingly. He described Russia as his ‘homeland’, insisting that he had never really ‘belonged’ to the British ruling class, and could not, therefore, have betrayed it. But more honestly, he admitted that he was ‘wholly and irreversibly English’. At times he sounded like a retired civil servant put out to grass (which, in a way, he was) harrumphing at the vulgarity of modern life, protesting against change. The new ways of cricket baffled and enraged him. ‘Aluminium bats, white balls, funny clothes . . . it is all too confusing for a gentleman of the old school like myself.’ In an unconscious echo of Marcus Lipton MP, he grumbled about ‘the ghastly din of modern music’ and ‘hooligans inflamed by bourgeois rock music’.