He had paused, so Hale shifted in his chair. “I remember the rope,” he said cautiously. He was disoriented by the incongruous public school Quis? and Ego exchange, which roughly meant Who wants this? and I’ll take it. A cigarette would have been a godsend, but there were no ashtrays in sight.
Theodora raised a lean finger. “And several of us don’t want to hear about it,” he said.
The red-haired man nodded, conceding the point. “I’m told,” he went on, still speaking to Hale, “that after the bash in ’48 you reported Philby as a double agent, one secretly working for Moscow.”
“His suspicions were, of course, not reported to my predecessor,” said White to the room at large, staring at the high plaster ceiling.
As if he were being cross-examined in a courtroom, Hale waited for an objection. When no one spoke, he said, “I filed a report to … my superior officer, stating my reasons for suspecting that. But,” he went on, forcing himself not to glance at the glowering Macmillan, “Philby has been exonerated since.”
Just from having read the newspapers Hale knew that Kim Philby had been working in Washington under some diplomatic cover until 1951, and that after his friend Guy Burgess and another Foreign Office diplomat named Maclean had fled to Moscow, Philby had been suspected of having been a spy himself, and of having warned Maclean that MI5 was about to arrest him for espionage. Philby had apparently been relieved of his SIS duties after that, though not formally charged with anything, and in 1955 an MP in the House of Commons had challenged Macmillan, Foreign Secretary at the time, to answer the accusation that Philby had been the “third man” in the alleged Soviet spy ring. Macmillan had subsequently read a prepared statement saying that the British government had no reason to suspect Philby of any collusion or wrongdoing.
At the moment Macmillan’s hands were clenched on the green leather chair back; Hale didn’t dare look up into the man’s face. “As far as SIS knew to advise,” said White stiffly, “that exoneration seven years ago was valid. No one in Broadway knew that the old wartime Special Operations Executive had covertly survived its official dissolution and was still doing intelligence work.”
White’s face was stiff with obvious suppressed anger, but the red-headed onetime Head of Station in Turkey flashed his brief grin again.
Hale blinked and didn’t change his expression—he had certainly known that a core group in SOE had ignored its shutdown order at the end of the war; he himself had gone on working for the divergent branch of the service for another three years—but he was chilled to hear his suspicion about Kim Philby apparently confirmed, after all this time. It had been one thing to be convinced, but it was quite another to virtually hear it from the Prime Minister.
“Declare wasn’t finished yet,” said Theodora mildly, “and it needed an independent, secure agency to run it. A number of the overseas wartime agencies didn’t actually close down when the war ended, but stayed on the rolls under ambiguous categories.” He paused, languidly waving his rattling ivory fan, and Hale knew White must be wondering what other splinter secret services might still be hidden in his trackless payroll.
“We took the warning about Philby seriously,” Theodora went on. “We investigated and concluded that in fact he was, and had for some time been, a KGB agent.”
Hale felt sick all over again, remembering the ambush into which he had led the men in his command. What were you all doing up there? Philby had blandly asked him, afterward. A thousand rounds of ammunition fired off in the Ahora Gorge!
“And,” Theodora went on, “late in ’52 we braced him—confronted him with facts and threats—and turned him double.” He smiled at Hale. “We even called you up then with the old signal— now didn’t we?—but it all happened too fast: he was in Turkey, on the Soviet border, and it turned out that Burgess was waiting for him right there on the red side of the Aras River, and they were on the verge of… trying it again. We managed to abort it and at the same time save Philby’s face with the Russians, but I’m afraid we did leave you rather at loose ends in Green Park, that day.”
Hale gave a tense flip of his fingers; the job interview he had missed ten years ago—even his current position at the University College of Weybridge—seemed like inconsequential pastimes now that he was again an active player in the deadly Great Game.
“We,” said White, “don’t know the Soviet timetable on this; but I’m afraid we’ve got a deadline of our own. A year ago a KGB officer named Golitsyn defected to the CIA in Helsinki and was extensively debriefed in Maryland; and this last August a woman in Israel, one Flora Solomon, contacted an old MI5 agent and told him a secret she’d been keeping since the ’30s. The upshot of their stories is that, as Mr. Theodora has known for ten years, Philby has been Moscow’s man all along, probably since 1934. And we at SIS—not having been told that he had already been confronted and turned!—well, I’m afraid steps are being taken, beyond my control now, to arrest him and offer him immunity in exchange for coming back to England and making a full confession. MI5 is aware of this too, and insists on getting him to their tough interrogation center at Ham Common in Richmond.”
Hale remembered Ham Common—he had in fact been interrogated there himself, and by Kim Philby, some twenty years ago.
“I don’t like that,” said Macmillan. “All these spies we’ve been arresting, exposing, admitting to! The Kroger couple and Lonsdale two years ago, the homosexual Vassal in September, this Fell woman giving MI5’s secrets to the Yugoslav Embassy just last month! Damn it, when my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t nail it up in the Master of the Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it, out of sight. I suppose we can’t simply shoot spies, as we did in the war—but they should be discovered and then played back in the old double-cross way, with or without their knowledge—never arrested.”
“Philby is too likely to jump at the proposed SIS offer of immunity, you see,” said Theodora. He shrugged and pursed his lips. “We, the old SOE, didn’t offer him immunity in ’52—we just told him that we’d kill him if he didn’t fully report to us any further contact the Soviets might have with him; and, if the day came, participate in any operation they might want him for, but do it working for us now. So he must be… induced to refuse the SIS offer when it’s made to him, and to follow through on his old agreement, go through with this big Soviet operation as our agent. He won’t want to, he’s boxed and… outfoxed. He’ll want to come home and leave the Russians to play out their present game without him.”
Hale managed a tight smile. “How am I to induce him to refuse the immunity offer?”
Leather creaked faintly as the other men relaxed without changing their positions.
“By pointing out to him,” said Theodora, “that our offer, SOE’s, takes precedence and still applies; that is, he can either work for the Russians in this thing as a double, reporting to us and doing what we tell him, or he can be killed. No other choice exists, regardless of what he may soon be hearing from an SIS representative.”