Ben Macintyre - A Spy Among Friends

Within minutes, a burst of gunfire rang out from the Georgian side. One of the men went down in the first volley. The other, Rukhadze, was spotted in the half-light, ‘striding through a sparse wood away from the Turkish frontier’. He did not get far, and was soon in the hands of Soviet intelligence. It is doubtful whether the torturers got much out of him before he died; he had little to reveal. Years later, Philby discussed the fate of the Georgians with the chief of the Georgian KGB: ‘The boys weren’t bad,’ he said. ‘Not at all. I knew very well that they would be caught and that a tragic fate awaited them. But on the other hand it was the only way of driving a stake through the plans of future operations.’ This ill-conceived, badly planned operation might well have failed anyway; but Philby could not have killed them more certainly if he had executed them himself. Their deaths did not trouble him, now or later. If there was a blot on his happy horizon, it was the increasingly erratic behaviour of his wife.

*

One evening in March 1949, Aileen Philby was found lying beside a country road with a gash in her head. When she regained consciousness, she explained that while taking a walk she had been viciously attacked by a Turkish man, who hit her with a rock. Several potential culprits were rounded up and brought to her hospital bedside ‘in chains’, but Aileen could not positively identify her assailant. The Turkish police were baffled; so were the doctors when septicaemia set in. Aileen was now extremely unwell. In this moment of crisis, Philby turned to his old friend.

Philby contacted Nicholas Elliott in Berne and told him that Aileen seemed to be ‘dying of some mysterious ailment’. Would Elliott find a Swiss doctor who could discover what was wrong with her? Elliott sprang into action. After an intensive trawl, he told Philby he had found just the man: a distinguished Swiss medical professor who had listened to Aileen’s symptoms and believed he could cure her. The Philbys immediately flew to Geneva, and travelled on by ambulance to Berne: Aileen was settled into a comfortable clinic, while Philby moved in with the Elliotts. Just days after her arrival, Aileen tried to set her room on fire, and then slashed her arm with a razor blade. The Swiss doctor swiftly established that Aileen’s original injury had been self-inflicted, then self-infected. The story of the roadside attack was fictitious. Aileen’s doctor in London, Lord Horder, confirmed a history of self-harm dating back to her teenage years, and Aileen was committed to a psychiatric clinic under close observation. Elliott was deeply shocked to discover that this ‘charming woman and loving wife and mother suffered, unknown to others, from a grave mental problem’. The Elliotts nursed her with tender solicitude; Nicholas Elliott sat at her bedside, feeding her grapes and jokes. Slowly, Aileen regained her strength, and a measure of mental composure.

Philby was livid, a reaction that struck Elliott as distinctly odd. He had expected Philby to be relieved that his wife had been diagnosed at last. Instead, his friend complained bitterly that Aileen had hoodwinked him, and vowed he would never forgive her. ‘It was an intense affront to Philby’s pride,’ Elliott concluded, that he, an intelligence professional schooled in deception, ‘had been tricked for so many years’ by his own wife. ‘He had to return to Istanbul knowing that all the years he had been living with Aileen, he had himself been deceived.’ Elliott would never have criticised Philby, particularly with regard to women. He knew about Philby’s extra-marital affairs, and passed no judgement. Indeed, Elliott had his own mistress, a Swedish woman he kept carefully hidden from Elizabeth. A chap’s marriage was his own business, and in Nick Elliott’s eyes Kim Philby could do no wrong. Still, it seemed strange that his friend should be so angered by a deception that was, in the end, medical rather than moral. From that moment on, Elliott reflected sadly, ‘the marriage steadily deteriorated’.

Aileen had been back in Istanbul less than a month when Philby announced that the family was on the move again: he had been offered, and had accepted, one of the most important jobs in British intelligence, as the MI6 chief in Washington DC.

*

The Berlin Blockade had thrown the escalating Cold War tension into sharp relief, and the power balance in the intelligence relationship between Britain and the US was shifting. The time when MI6 could patronise the American amateurs, new to the game of espionage, was long gone, and in Whitehall Britain’s spy chiefs wrestled with the novel and uncomfortable sensation that the Americans were now calling the shots, running a new kind of war against the Soviets, and paying the bills for it. For most of the Second World War, the US had been the junior partner on intelligence issues, grateful to follow the British lead. That relationship was now reversing, but the veterans of MI6 were determined to prove that Britain was still a master of the intelligence game, despite mounting evidence of an empire in steep decline. One way to stop the rot was to send a young star to Washington, a decorated wartime intelligence hero with a dazzling record, as living proof that British intelligence was just as vigorous and effective as it had always been.

In the US, Philby would be responsible for maintaining the Anglo-American intelligence relationship, liaising with the CIA and the FBI, and even handling secret communications between the British Prime Minister and the President. MI6 could hardly have offered him a more emphatic vote of confidence. Philby’s had been one of three names in the running for this coveted post, and it had been left to the Americans to choose their preferred candidate. According to CIA historian Ray Cline, ‘It was James Jesus Angleton who selected Philby’s name.’

Aileen was not consulted about the new job. Philby did not even wait for the approval of his Soviet handlers. He accepted this irresistible new posting exactly half an hour after it was offered. ‘At one stroke, it would take me right back into the middle of intelligence policy making and it would give me a close-up view of the American intelligence organisations,’ he wrote. It also offered ‘unlimited possibilities’ for fresh espionage on behalf of his Soviet masters.

News of Philby’s appointment was greeted with sadness by his colleagues in Istanbul, who had grown used to his combination of conviviality and efficiency. ‘Who am I supposed to work with now?’ wondered the ambassador, Sir David Kelly. In London, the appointment was seen as a natural progression for a man destined for the top. Elliott was delighted, and if he felt a twinge of envy that his friend seemed to be climbing the ladder faster than he was, he was much too British to show it.

Philby flew back to London in early September to be briefed on his new role. He made a point of looking up old contacts in both MI5 and MI6, and inviting each of them to come and stay with him in Washington. ‘I was lunched at many clubs,’ he wrote. ‘Discussions over coffee and port covered many subjects.’ Those very same subjects were also discussed by Philby in a series of meetings, no less cheerful but even more clandestine, in various London parks. Boris Krötenschield was pleased by his agent’s new appointment, and deeply impressed by the dedication of this double-sided man: ‘One side is open to family and friends and everyone around them,’ Krötenschield reported to Moscow Centre. ‘The other belongs only to himself and his secret work.’

Much of Philby’s time in London was spent discussing Albania. Most citizens of Britain, America and the USSR, if they thought about Albania at all, imagined a wild country on the edge of Europe, a place of almost mythical irrelevance to the rest of the world. But Albania, sandwiched between Yugoslavia, Greece and the Adriatic, was poised to become a key Cold War battlefield. After the war, Albania’s King Zog was deposed as the country came under the iron rule of Enver Hoxha, the ruthless and wily leader of the communist partisans, who set about transforming Albania into a Stalinist state. By 1949, Albania presented a tempting target for the anti-communist hawks in British and American intelligence: separated from the Soviet bloc by Yugoslavia (itself split from the USSR), Albania was poor, feudal, sparsely populated and politically volatile. Many exiled Albanian royalists and nationalists were itching to return to their homeland and do battle with the communists. Viewed from London and Washington, through a veil of wishful thinking, Albania appeared ready to shake off communism: trained guerrillas would be slipped into Albania to link up with local rebel groups, eventually sparking civil war and toppling Hoxha. If Albanian communism was successfully undermined, it was believed, this would set off a ‘chain reaction that would roll back the tide of Soviet Imperialism’. The SOE had played an important role in Albania during the war, and it was therefore agreed that Britain should take the lead in training the Albanian rebels, with the US as an enthusiastic partner. Philby was fully briefed on the plans. The first wave of insurgents would be sent in by boat from Italy in October 1948; the mission was codenamed ‘Valuable’.