Other old habits persisted. His marriage to Eleanor staggered on for a time, but it was broken inside. She found Moscow grey, cold and lonely. One day she asked him: ‘What is more important in your life, me and the children, or the Communist Party?’ Philby’s answer was the one he always gave when asked to measure feeling against politics. ‘The party, of course.’ He not only demanded admiration for his ideological consistency, for having ‘stayed the course’, but sympathy for what it had cost him. ‘If you only knew what hell it is when your political convictions clash with your personal affections,’ he wrote in a note to the diplomat Glen Balfour-Paul. On the few occasions he received visitors from the West, he asked hungrily after news of friends. ‘Friendship is the most important thing of all,’ he declared, as if he had not undermined every one of his own. Lorraine Copeland wrote that it was ‘painful to think that during the years we all loved Kim and had him constantly in our homes, he was all the while laughing at us’. Philby bridled at that suggestion. ‘I wasn’t laughing at them. I have always operated on two levels, a personal level and a political one. When the two have come into conflict I have had to put politics first. The conflict can be very painful. I don’t like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it.’ But not so badly as to stop.
Philby rekindled his friendship with Donald Maclean and his wife Melinda, and the two exiled couples were naturally thrown together. Maclean spoke fluent Russian, and had been given a job analysing British foreign policy. He often worked late. Philby and Melinda started going to the opera, and then on shopping trips together. In 1964, Eleanor returned to the US to renew her passport and see her daughter. In her absence, Kim Philby and Melinda Maclean started an affair. It was a fitting liaison: Philby was secretly sleeping with the wife of an ideological comrade, and cheating on his own wife, repeating once again the strange cycle of friendship and betrayal that defined his world. Eleanor returned, discovered the affair, and announced she was leaving him for good: Philby did not try to stop her. He did, however, present her with his most treasured possession, his old Westminster scarf. ‘It had travelled with him – from school days to exile in Moscow,’ wrote Elliott. This symbolic loyalty to his old school was, Elliott thought, a ‘supreme example of schizophrenia’. At the airport, a KGB officer sent Eleanor on her way with a bunch of tulips.
Like Aileen before her, Eleanor did not long survive their final break-up. She wrote a poignant, pained memoir, and died three years after returning to the US. ‘He betrayed many people, me included,’ she wrote. ‘Kim had the guts, or the weakness, to stand by a decision he made thirty years ago, whatever the cost to those who loved him most.’ Eleanor spent the remainder of her life wondering who she had really married, and concluded: ‘No one can ever really know another human being.’
*
James Jesus Angleton’s personality was transformed by the realisation that he had never really known Kim Philby. His faith in his fellow men had never been strong, but he had believed in the British notion that the inner ring could always be trusted; after Philby’s defection a profound and poisonous paranoia seemed to seize him. ‘The emotional wreckage of that close friendship made him distrust everybody and coloured his life from that point on.’ He became convinced that a vast, overarching conspiracy must be taking place under his nose, orchestrated by Philby, from Moscow. ‘Jim just continued to think that Philby was a key actor in the KGB grand plan,’ one CIA contemporary said of Angleton. ‘To him, Philby was never just a drunken, burned-out ex-spy. He was a leader of the orchestra.’ In Angleton’s warped logic, if Philby had fooled him, then there must be many other KGB spies in positions of influence in the West. ‘Never again would he permit himself to be so badly duped. He would trust no one.’
Convinced that the CIA was riddled with Soviet spies, Angleton set about rooting them out, detecting layer after layer of deception surrounding him. He suspected that a host of world leaders were under KGB control, including British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Olof Palme of Sweden and German Chancellor Willy Brandt. He drew up more than 10,000 case files on suspect individuals, anti-war protesters and internal dissidents, often gathering information by illegal means. The damage he inflicted on the CIA reached such levels that some even accused him of being a Soviet mole himself, destroying the organisation from within by creating a climate of debilitating suspicion. Uncompromising and obsessive, more than a decade after Philby’s vanishing act Angleton was still ascribing every fresh sign of treachery to the man he had once idolised. ‘This is all Kim’s work,’ he would mutter.
Nicholas Elliott watched and wondered as Angleton descended into his wilderness of mirrors. They remained friends, from a distance, but the warmth had gone. The Philby betrayal seemed to metastasise in Angleton’s mind. ‘He had trusted him and confided in him far beyond any routine relationship between the colleagues of two friendly countries,’ wrote Elliott. ‘The knowledge that he, Jim, the top expert in the world on Soviet espionage, had been totally deceived, had a cataclysmic effect on his personality. Jim henceforward found it difficult to trust anybody, to make two and two add up to four.’ Elliott believed his old friend was being devoured by distrust: ‘Over-suspicion can sometimes have more tragic results than over-credulity. His tragedy was that he was so often deceived by his own ingenuity, and the consequences were often disastrous.’
James Angleton was forced out of the CIA in 1974, when the extent of his illegal mole-hunting was revealed. He retired with his orchids, his fishing rods and his secrets, a man of deep and enduring mystery, and a brilliant fool. In retirement, he spent much of his time in the Army and Navy Club, a place strongly redolent of an old-fashioned London gentleman’s club. He continued to insist that he had suspected Kim Philby from the start, but his weeding from CIA files of every reference to his relationship with Philby was proof enough of the falsity of that claim. Philby haunted the CIA. ‘I don’t know that the damage he did can ever be actually calculated,’ wrote Richard Helms, the CIA chief appointed in 1966. One CIA historian assessed the cost by means of italics: ‘at least twenty-five major, but major operations, were destroyed.’
In 1987, Angleton attended a luncheon with former CIA officers at the Officers’ Club in Fort Myer outside Washington. He was sixty-nine, but looked a decade older, his body racked by cancer that had started in the lungs. His colleagues urged him to ‘come clean in the Philby case’. Angleton gave one of his crippled half-smiles, and said: ‘There are some matters that I shall have to take to the grave with me, and Kim is one of them.’