A week later, true to his word, he was dead.
*
Nicholas Elliott’s career was hobbled by his association with Philby. Some in MI6 believed he had allowed Philby to flee Beirut out of personal loyalty. Some still do. By the 1960s, the Robber Barons who had come of age in the 1940s were creatures of the past. MI6 was more professional, less buccaneering, and in Elliott’s view, a lot less fun. Sir Stewart Menzies and Elliott remained close friends. In 1968, the former C fell off his horse while riding with the Beaufort Hunt, and never recovered. Elliott was the only serving MI6 officer to attend the funeral. By now he was Director of Requirements at MI6, responsible for the quality and relevance of information produced by the intelligence service for other government departments. It was an important job, but bureaucratic, and exactly the sort of role he had always despised. ‘To be in administration was, in my view, the last resort.’
Elliott retired in 1968, after almost thirty years as a spy. ‘Rather to my surprise I did not miss the confidential knowledge which no longer filtered through my in-tray,’ he wrote. He joined the board of Lonrho, the international mining and media company based in Cheapside in the City of London, and led by the maverick businessman Tiny Rowland. Elliott considered Rowland ‘a modern Cecil Rhodes’, which did not stop him from joining a boardroom coup against him. When this failed, Rowland ousted the rebels, including Elliott, whom he described as ‘the Harry Lime of Cheapside’. Elliott was thrilled to be compared to the sinister character played by Orson Welles in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, and adopted it as his soubriquet. He joined a firm of stockbrokers, but found himself ‘incapable of leading that kind of life without relapsing into a slough of depression and boredom’ and soon gave it up, to pursue a life of esoteric and eccentric interests.
Elliott bought a share in a racehorse, and never missed a day of Ascot. He watched a great deal of cricket, and built up a fine wine cellar. He became interested in graphology, the pseudo-scientific study of handwriting, and found he had a ‘gift for dowsing’, the ability to locate underground water, ore and gems. He could be frequently seen marching across the countryside of the Home Counties with his divining rods, and then energetically digging holes. He approached MI6 with a plan to exhume buried Nazi treasure from the grounds of a monastery in Rome. He also took up transcendental meditation, which he considered a spiritual ‘alternative to involvement in religion’. Klop Ustinov turned up at Wilton Street from time to time, with hot veal kidneys à la liégeoise, in a hat box. Elliott’s daughter Claudia died tragically young but, as ever, his stiff upper lip precluded public grief. He spent much of his time in clubs, where he was admired as a raconteur of risqué anecdotes, the conversational refuge of the Englishman who does not know quite what to say, or cannot say what he really knows. He was no longer in the inner ring, but he did not yet abandon the secret world.
In the early 1980s, a tall, spare figure in an immaculate three-piece suit could be seen from time to time slipping without fanfare into Number Ten, Downing Street. Nicholas Elliott had become – no one was quite sure how – an unofficial adviser on intelligence matters to Margaret Thatcher. What was discussed during these meetings has never been fully revealed, and Elliott was far too discreet to say, but his political antennae were impeccable: after the break up of the Soviet Union, he correctly predicted the emergence of an authoritarian government in Russia; he foresaw the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of Iranian aggression, and the growing economic and political clout of China. Thatcher undoubtedly shared his view that post-imperial Britain was ‘showing a quite unjustified lack of self-confidence’. The costume of an éminence grise fitted him well.
As Elliott aged, the pain of Philby’s perfidy ebbed. Unlike Angleton, he would not allow Philby’s ghost to torment and destroy him. He came to see the way he had been duped not as a mark of shame, but as a badge of honour. Philby had been able to manipulate Elliott’s loyal constancy, his adherence to an old code of behaviour, as a weapon against him, and there was no dishonour in that. Yet he never ceased to wonder how someone who had been raised and educated as he had, someone he had known ‘extremely well over an extended period’, could have chosen such a radically different path. ‘I have naturally given thought to the motivations behind treachery,’ he wrote. In later life, he found himself trying to understand ‘Philby the man, and make some form of analysis of the personality that evolved.’ Whenever he reflected on the lives Philby had wasted, his anger welled up. ‘Outwardly he was a kindly man. Inwardly he must have been cold, calculating and cruel – traits which he cleverly concealed from his friends and colleagues. He undoubtedly had a high opinion of himself concealed behind a veil of false modesty and thus a firm streak of egocentricity.’ Philby had been a two-sided man, Elliott concluded, and he had only ever seen one, beguiling side, ‘a façade, in a schizophrenic personality with a supreme talent for deception’.
Though part of Elliott detested Philby, he also mourned him. He recalled Philby’s small kindnesses, the devotion he inspired in others, his enchanting mischief. He imagined him living a ‘sad exiled life’ in Moscow, with ‘dreary people, a spying servant, drab clothes’ and felt a twinge of something like sympathy for a man of rare talents, whose life had been ‘wasted in a futile cause’, who had ‘decided to betray his friends, his family, and country for a creed that is now universally discredited’. He missed the spark that had drawn him to Philby on the very first day they met in 1940. ‘He had charm to burn,’ he wrote, with a reluctant wistfulness. ‘He is said to have it still.’
Philby also found his thoughts turning to Elliott in old age, and reached the firm conclusion that he had been manoeuvred into fleeing Beirut: ‘The whole thing was staged so as to push me into escaping.’ Elliott had been motivated by the ‘desire to spare SIS another spy scandal in London’, and had unloaded him on Moscow.
As the Cold War raged, Philby was used as a propaganda tool by both sides. The Soviets set out to prove that he was living, in the words of one apologist, a life in Moscow of ‘blissful peace’. In 1968, with KGB approval (and editing), he published a memoir, My Silent War, a blend of fact and fiction, history and disinformation, which depicted Soviet intelligence as uniformly brilliant, and himself as a hero of ideological constancy. Political voices in the West insisted that the reverse was true, and that Philby, drunken, depressed and disillusioned, was getting his just deserts for a life of betrayal and adherence to a diabolical doctrine. US President Ronald Reagan declared: ‘How sleepless must be Kim Philby’s nights in Moscow . . . how profoundly he and others like him must be aware that the people they betrayed are going to be victors in the end.’ One former MI5 officer even claimed to know what was going through Philby’s mind when he did fall asleep: ‘He’s a totally sad man, dreaming of a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door.’
The truth was somewhere in between. Philby was deeply unhappy during the early years in Soviet Russia, a place Burgess had memorably described as ‘like Glasgow on a Saturday night in Victorian times’. The affair with Melinda soon fizzled out; she returned to Maclean, and then left the USSR for good. Philby drank heavily, often alone, and suffered from chronic insomnia. He would later admit that his life became ‘burdensome’. At some point he tried to end it, by slashing his wrists. But in 1970, his spirits began to lift when George Blake, his fellow exile, introduced him to Rufina Ivanovna, a Russian woman of Polish extraction twenty years his junior, who would become his fourth wife. The KGB sent them a tea set of English bone china as a wedding present. The lingering suspicion of the Soviet intelligence service cleared, and in 1977, Philby gave a lecture to KGB officers, in which he insisted that the secret agent should admit nothing under interrogation, and on no account provide a confession. ‘Any confession involves giving information to the enemy. It is therefore – by definition – wrong.’ Some of his audience must have known that Philby had himself confessed to Nicholas Elliott back in 1963. They were much too tactful to point this out.