On Graham Greene:
‘I met him in Sierra Leone in the war. Greene was waiting for me at the harbour. “Have you brought any French letters?” he yelled at me soon as I came within earshot. He had this fixation about eunuchs. He’d been reading the station code book and found that the Service actually had a code group for eunuch. Must have been from the days when we were running eunuchs in the harems, as agents. He was dying to make a signal with eunuch in it. Then one day he found a way. Head Office wanted him to attend a conference somewhere. Cape Town I think. He had some operation fixed or something. Not an operation, knowing him, he never mounted one. Anyway he signalled back “Like the eunuch I can’t come.”’
A wartime reminiscence of life in Turkey under diplomatic cover:
‘Dinner at the ambassador’s. Middle of the war. Ambassadress lets out a yell because I’ve cut off the nose. “Nose of what?” “The cheese.” “The valet handed me the bloody cheese,” I tell her. “And you cut the nose off it,” she says. Hell did they get it from? Middle of the bloody war. Cheddar. And the chap who’d handed it to me was Cicero, the fellow who sold all our secrets to the Abwehr. The D-Day landing. The lot. And the Huns didn’t believe him. Typical. No faith.’
I am describing to Elliott how, while I was in MI5, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana was published and the Service’s legal adviser wanted to prosecute him under the Official Secrets Act for revealing the relationship between a head of station and his head agent.
‘Yes, and he jolly nearly got done for it. Would have served him bloody right.’
What for? But I didn’t ask.
*
And most memorable of all, perhaps, Elliott recalling a passage, real or imagined, from what he insisted were his early soundings of Philby concerning his Cambridge days:
‘They seem to think you’re a bit tarnished somehow.’
‘By?’
‘Oh, you know, early passions, membership – ’
‘Of?’
‘Jolly interesting group, actually, by the sounds of it. Exactly what university is for. Lefties all getting together. The Apostles, wasn’t it?’
*
In 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall came down, I was visiting Moscow. At a reception given by the Union of Soviet Writers, a part-time journalist with KGB connections named Genrikh Borovik invited me to his house to meet an old friend and admirer of my work. The name of the friend, when I enquired, was Kim Philby. I now have it on pretty good authority that Philby knew he was dying and was hoping I would collaborate with him on another volume of memoirs.
I refused to meet him. Elliott was pleased with me. At least I think he was. But perhaps he secretly hoped I might bring him news of his old friend.
Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby at the age of eighteen: the secret Cambridge communist.
Philby as a boy of about eight years old.
The young Philby: ‘He was the sort of man who won worshippers.’
St John Philby, noted Arab scholar, explorer, writer, troublemaker and demanding father.
Elliott, the Eton schoolboy, born to rule, who hid his shyness behind a barrage of jokes.
Claude Elliott, father of Nicholas, celebrated mountaineer and provost of Eton, accompanies a young Queen Elizabeth II on a tour of the school.
Basil Fisher (left) and Nicholas Elliott: their close friendship came to a tragic end when Fisher was shot down in the Battle of Britain.
The Cambridge spies
Donald Maclean: a talented linguist destined for the Foreign Office.
Guy Burgess: witty, flamboyant, highly intelligent and pure trouble.
Anthony Blunt with Cambridge friends: a brilliant art historian and a Soviet spy.
Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge: the unlikely crucible of communist revolution.
Alice ‘Litzi’ Kohlman, Philby’s first love and first wife, an activist in the Viennese communist underground.
Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian photographer married to an Englishman, arranged Philby’s rendezvous with the Soviet intelligence service.
Street violence erupts in Vienna in 1933, as the extreme right-wing government goes to war with the left.
Nicholas Elliott, as a new recruit to MI6. ‘A convivial camaraderie prevailed, rather like a club.’
James Jesus Angleton, an apprentice intelligence officer in wartime London. An American from Idaho, he was ‘more English than the English’ and an honorary member of the club.
Philby (second from left), The Times war correspondent, at a lunch with Lord Gort (to Philby’s left), commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, 1939.
Arnold Deutsch, alias ‘Otto’, Philby’s charismatic recruiter and spy-master.
Klop Ustinov, Russian-born German journalist, secret agent for Britain and father of the actor Peter Ustinov.
Theodore Maly, Philby’s NKVD controller, later murdered in Stalin’s purges.
Alexander Foote, Britishborn radio operator for the Soviet spy network ‘Rote Kapelle’.
Yuri Modin, the subtle and ingenious handler of the Cambridge spy network.
Igor Gouzenko, masked, awaiting interviews with the press after his defection in 1945.
Dick White, a former schoolmaster, was the chief of MI5 counterintelligence in 1951.
C: Sir Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6.
Felix Cowgill, chief of Section V, the MI6 counter-intelligence unit based in St Albans.
Guy Liddelclass="underline" MI5 head of counter-intelligence and diarist.
Victor Rothschild, MI5 head of counter-sabotage and friend of Kim Philby.
Valentine Vivian, known as Vee-Vee, the Deputy Chief of MI6 who vouched for Philby: ‘I knew his people.’
Sarah Algeria Marjorie Maxse, organisation officer for the Conservative Party and recruiter for MI6. Philby found her ‘intensely likeable’.
Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley, the Sunday Express war correspondent who steered Philby into MI6.
Elizabeth Holberton, Nicholas Elliott’s MI6 secretary, confidante and finally wife.
The Elliotts on their wedding day, outside the Park Hotel, Istanbul, 10 April 1943.
Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren. The Vermehrens’ defection, organised by Elliott, plunged the German intelligence service into crisis.