Philby’s last years were quiet, dutiful and domesticated. Rufina tried to wean him off the booze, with only partial success. He did odd jobs for the Soviet state, including the training of KGB recruits and helping to motivate the Soviet hockey team – even though, as Elliott once noted, he was addicted to cricket and ‘showed no interest whatsoever in any other sort of sport’. He was awarded the Order of Lenin, which he compared to a knighthood, ‘one of the better ones’. In return, he never criticised the system he had supported all his adult life, never acknowledged the true character of the organisation he had served, and never uttered a word of remorse. In the officially approved Soviet style, he maintained that any errors in practical communism lay not with the ideas, but with the people executing them.
Philby died in a Moscow hospital on 11 May 1988. He was given a grand funeral with a KGB honour guard, buried at Kuntsevo cemetery outside Moscow, and lauded for his ‘tireless struggle in the cause of peace and a brighter future’. He was commemorated with a Soviet postage stamp. In 2011, the Russian foreign intelligence service put up a plaque with two faces of Kim Philby facing one another in profile, an inadvertently apt monument to a man with two sides to his head.
Elliott hatched a plan for a different sort of memorial. He recommended to MI6 that Philby be awarded the CMG, the order of St Michael and St George, the sixth most prestigious award in the British honours system, awarded to men and women who render extraordinary or important non-military service in a foreign country. Elliott further suggested that he write a signed obituary note to accompany the award, in which he would say only: ‘My lips have hitherto been sealed but I can now reveal that Philby was one of the bravest men I have ever known.’ The implication would be clear to Moscow: Philby had been acting for Britain all along; he was not a valiant Soviet double agent, but a heroic British triple agent, and Elliott had been his spymaster. The idea that Philby had fooled the KGB would cause ‘a tremendous fluttering in the dovecotes of the Lubyanka’, Elliott wrote, and inflict the most gratifying posthumous revenge. It would be a splendid tease at Philby’s expense, to which he could have no answer. Elliott’s proposal was turned down. The new-style MI6 did not do jokes.
As his own end approached, Elliott reflected on a life that had been ‘undistinguished, albeit mildly notorious’, and tremendous fun.
He had known indignity, misfortune and intimate betrayal, but his fund of natural optimism never ran out. ‘I feel I have been extraordinarily lucky,’ he wrote. ‘I look back on my career with some wonderment.’
Elliott kept a part of Philby with him always. He treasured the old umbrella he had bought so many years ago, in admiring imitation of his closest friend, and his worst enemy. When Elliott died in 1994, he left behind a short memoir, mostly consisting of off-colour stories, with a rueful, self-mocking title: Never Judge a Man by His Umbrella.
It was a joke that only two people could have fully appreciated: Nicholas Elliott, and Kim Philby.
See Notes on Chapter 20
Afterword
John le Carré
‘God, it would be good to be a fake somebody, rather than a real nobody’
Mike Tyson, world heavyweight boxing champion
Nicholas Elliott of MI6 was the most charming, witty, elegant, courteous, compulsively entertaining spy I ever met. In retrospect, he also remains the most enigmatic. To describe his appearance is, these days, to invite ridicule. He was a bon viveur of the old school. I never once saw him in anything but an immaculately cut, dark three-piece suit. He had perfect Etonian manners, and delighted in human relationships.
He was thin as a wand, and seemed always to hover slightly above the ground at a jaunty angle, a quiet smile on his face and one elbow cocked for the Martini glass or cigarette.
His waistcoats curved inwards, never outwards. He looked like a P. G. Wodehouse man-about-town, and spoke like one, with the difference that his conversation was startlingly forthright, knowledgeable, and recklessly disrespectful of authority.
During my service in MI6, Elliott and I had been on nodding terms at most. When I was first interviewed for the Service, he was on the selection board. When I became a new entrant, he was a fifth-floor grandee whose most celebrated espionage coup – the wartime recruitment of a highly placed member of the German Abwehr in Istanbul, smuggling him and his wife to Britain – was held up to trainees as the ultimate example of what a resourceful field officer could achieve.
And he remained that same glamorous, remote figure throughout my service. Flitting elegantly in and out of head office, he would deliver a lecture, attend an operational conference, down a few glasses in the grandees’ bar, and be gone.
I resigned from the Service at the age of thirty-three, having made a negligible contribution. Elliott resigned at the age of fifty-three, having been central to pretty well every major operation that the Service had undertaken since the outbreak of the Second World War. Years later, I bumped into him at a party.
After a turbulent spell in the City, Elliott in the most civilised of ways seemed a bit lost. He was also deeply frustrated by our former Service’s refusal to let him reveal secrets which in his opinion had long passed their keep-till date. He believed he had a right, even a duty, to speak truth to history. And perhaps that’s where he thought I might come in – as some sort of go-between or cut out, as the spies would have it, who would help him get his story into the open where it belonged.
Above all, he wanted to talk to me about his friend, colleague, and nemesis, Kim Philby.
And so it happened, one evening in May 1986 in my house in Hampstead, twenty-three years after he had sat down with Philby in Beirut and listened to his partial confession, that Nicholas Elliott opened his heart to me in what turned out to be the first in a succession of such meetings. Or if not his heart, a version of it.
And it quickly became clear that he wanted to draw me in, to make me marvel, as he himself marvelled; to make me share his awe and frustration at the enormity of what had been done to him; and to feel, if I could, or at least imagine, the outrage and the pain that his refined breeding and good manners – let alone the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act – obliged him to conceal.
Sometimes while he talked I scribbled in a notebook and he made no objection. Looking over my notes a quarter of a century later – twenty-eight pages from one sitting alone, handwritten on fading notepaper, a rusty staple at one corner – I am comforted that there is hardly a crossing out.
Was I contemplating a novel built around the Philby-Elliott relationship? I can’t have been. I’d already covered the ground in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A piece of live theatre, perhaps? A two-hander, the Nick & Kim Show, spread over twenty years of mutual affection – I dare almost call it love – and devastating, relentless betrayal?
If that was what I secretly had in mind, Elliott would have none of it:
‘May we not ever again think about the play,’ he wrote to me sternly in 1991. And I have tried not to ever since.