Young Philby (27 page)

The passenger looked back over the stern at the lights of the Lebanese capital. In his mind’s eye, they appeared to be stammering in Morse code on the receding horizon, much the way he stammered when he spoke. He wondered what message they might be sending. Squinting, he thought he could make out the dimmer lights of the Druze village on a hillside above Beirut where his father had lived out his last days in a modest cottage. The Englishman had driven up most weekends, and they had spent countless hours taking the sun on wooden reclining chairs in the small garden, talking about how the Great Game might play out. When the end came the Englishman had buried his father in a Muslim graveyard below the village, marking the site, as Muslims did, with a small stone. As there was no name engraved on the stone, nobody would know where St John was buried now that his boy had left.

The Englishman, a Middle East correspondent for two London newspapers,
The Observer
and
The Economist
, had fled Beirut one jump ahead of the British agents come to arrest him as a Soviet spy. He left the city with the clothes on his back, two thick woolen sweaters worn one over the other, a spare pair of reading glasses, ten small tins of Arm & Hammer indigestion tablets, and the much-thumbed copy of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Book number 1, James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
, that his father had had sent from Harrods in 1939 to replace the hardcover edition he’d lost during the Spanish Civil War. The Englishman had used both the hardcover and the paperback edition of
Lost Horizon
for enciphering purposes (page number, line number, letter number) when he’d communicated with his Soviet controllers. He expected to keep in touch with his father’s friends in London the same way after he reached Moscow.

As a spy, the Englishman had had a bloody good run. He’d managed to lead a double life—or should that be triple?—for the better part of two decades. His career had come to an abrupt halt in the early 1950s when Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service seconded him to Washington as the British liaison with the CIA. American code breakers were in the process of exposing Donald Maclean, the Englishman’s chum since their undergraduate days at Cambridge University, as a Soviet agent. The Englishman had straightaway come under suspicion and been expelled from America, then grilled for months by SIS interrogators who had thrown every botched intelligence operation, every blown agent in his face. He’d shrugged until his shoulders hurt, denying everything. As they had no smoking gun, they couldn’t bring charges against him without a confession. SIS had been obliged to fire him, since the Americans refused to talk to their British cousins while this particular Englishman was on their payroll. After a decent interval he had gone back to the career he’d begun in Spain during the Civil War: journalism. Which is how he wound up as a Middle East correspondent in Beirut.

As the lights of the Lebanese capital vanished into the penumbra where land met sea, the Englishman turned to gaze ahead over the fall of salt spray on the fo’c’s’le, trying to imagine the life that awaited him in the Soviet
Shangri-La
.

Would the Russians swallow the scenario that his sainted father had concocted?

Would they believe Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service had turned up in Beirut with the last piece of the puzzle, hard evidence that he was in fact a longtime Soviet penetration agent?

Would Moscow Centre welcome him into the Heart of Darkness as a senior Soviet intelligence officer?

Would he be allowed to order books from
Bowes & Bowes of
Cambridge and tins of Arm & Hammer indigestion tablets from Harrods?

Would the Great Game the Englishman was so keen on playing have a third act?

For spies and rock climbers, was there really no way out except up?

CODA: A TRUE SPY STORY

Where the Author of
Young Philby
Explains Why the Idea That Kim Philby Might Have Been a Double Agent—Or Should That Be Triple?—Is Not Far-Fetched

I spent the winter of 2000 in Jerusalem doing research for a novel set in the Middle East. One evening I had dinner with my great friend Zev Birger, the head of the Jerusalem Book Fair at the time. He had been instrumental in introducing me to then retired prime minister, now president of Israel, Shimon Peres, with whom I eventually collaborated on a book of conversations. Zev, who was said to know everyone important in Israel, asked me out of the blue if there was anyone in the country I wanted to meet that I hadn’t met. I told him that as a matter of fact there was. It was the longtime mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, by then retired.

The next morning Zev phoned to say he had arranged a rendezvous. At noon on 31 January 2000 I turned up in Teddy Kollek’s office at the Jerusalem Foundation on Rivka Street. Mr. Kollek, a heavy man, then eighty-nine, who smoked thin cigars, waved me to a seat across the desk and asked why I wanted to see him. He regarded me through professorial half-glasses that had slipped down along his nose. I explained that I was familiar with his biography: He’d grown up in Vienna and had been active in Socialist circles there in the early 1930s. I was curious to know if Mr. Kollek had come across a young Cambridge graduate in Vienna named Kim Philby. Mr. Kollek said that everyone in the leftist community in Vienna had been acquainted with Philby in those days, that he himself knew him by sight. I asked if Mr. Kollek had known Litzi Friedman as well. Yes, he said, he’d known Litzi well enough to say hello to her; in Vienna, he continued, everyone knew she was a Communist and many assumed she was some sort of Soviet agent. I asked if Mr. Kollek was aware that Philby and the Friedman woman had gotten married in Vienna after the right-wing Chancellor Dollfuss suppressed the Socialists and Communists in 1934. Again he said yes, it was common knowledge that Philby had married Litzi to get her a British passport. And then, to my surprise, he added that it had been widely assumed Litzi Friedman must have recruited Philby as a Soviet agent.

Unprompted, Mr. Kollek began telling me another story:

When the Jewish state was born in 1948, the Mossad, Israel’s CIA, was eager to contact the new American Central Intelligence Agency, but the CIA people, believing that the Mossad might have been infiltrated by Soviet agents posing as Jewish refugees, kept the Israelis at arm’s length. After repeated requests, the Americans finally relented and agreed to a first tentative meeting. It was Teddy Kollek, working for the Mossad, who was dispatched to a certain room in the Statler Hotel in Washington to make contact. The person representing the CIA at that initial meeting turned out to be none other than its legendary counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton.

A word about James Angleton: Fresh out of Yale University in the early 1940s, he’d joined the American wartime intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services, and been posted to London to learn counterintelligence from His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. It was the older and more experienced Kim Philby, a rising star in the SIS, who took the young American under his wing. The two became fast friends, bunking together on cots in the SIS building during the German blitz, climbing to the roof to watch the German bombers raiding London. After the war in Europe ended, Angleton moved on to direct OSS operations in Italy, and when President Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1940s, Angleton became its counterintelligence chief.

When Teddy Kollek and Angleton met in the Statler, they hit it off and became good friends. In Mr. Kollek’s words, they had a close relationship. Mr. Kollek brought Angleton, whose hobby was growing orchids, rare Israeli orchids from a farm that belonged to the Rothschilds and dined with Angleton and his wife, Cicely, at their Washington home. And of course they regularly collaborated on intelligence matters.

Fast-forward to the early 1950s: With the Cold War in full swing, Mr. Kollek came to Washington to see his friend Angleton at the CIA buildings, old World War II barracks on the Reflecting Pool. “I was walking toward Angleton’s office,” Kollek told me when I interviewed him in Jerusalem, “when suddenly I spotted a familiar face at the other end of the hallway. There was no mistake about it. I burst into Angleton’s office and said: ‘Jim, you’ll never guess whom I saw in the hallway. It was Kim Philby!’ And I told him about Vienna and the marriage to Litzi Friedman and the suspicion that Philby may have been recruited by her as a Soviet agent. And I said: ‘Once a Communist, always a Communist.’”

Startled, I asked Mr. Kollek if those had been his exact words. “Yes,” he said. “I told him, ‘Once a Communist, always a Communist.’”

I asked if Angleton had reacted. “No, Jim never reacted to anything. The subject was dropped and never raised again.”

When Mr. Kollek spotted Philby at the end of the hallway, he was serving in Washington as liaison between the Brits and their American counterparts at the CIA and FBI. Kim met with his old pal from London, Jim Angleton, almost daily. The two regularly lunched together at a Georgetown watering hole on Fridays.

“What happened after you told Angleton about Philby and Vienna?” I asked.

I have this memory of Mr. Kollek concentrating on the ash threatening to drop off the end of his cigar. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied.

My guess is at the heart of
Young Philby
.

In the course of Angleton’s long career, which ended when he was fired by CIA director William Colby in 1975, the counterintelligence chief was obsessed with the possibility of Soviet penetration. CIA employees who spoke fluent Russian or had Russian- or Polish-sounding names fell under a cloud. Lie detector tests were administered left and right; not everyone passed. Careers were ruined by Angleton’s shadow of a doubt. Would-be defectors were turned away for fear they might be Soviet disinformation agents. Ultimately the CIA’s entire Soviet Russia division was gutted and its operations against the Soviet Union crippled because of Angleton’s obsession with Soviet penetration. Whether Angleton learned about Philby’s suspicious past (Cambridge Socialist Society, Vienna, Litzi Friedman) from Teddy Kollek, or knew it already, it is unthinkable that he would have permitted Philby to set foot inside the CIA’s sanctum unless …

Unless he had personally
turned
Philby, or Philby had been a British agent feeding disinformation to Moscow all along. In the end, the best way to penetrate the Soviet Heart of Darkness would be to make Moscow Centre think it had penetrated Western intelligence agencies. At which point the British and Americans, in the words of my character
the Hajj,
could feed the Soviets disinformation until the cows came home.

When Donald Maclean, on the point of being exposed as a Soviet agent, fled to Moscow (along with Guy Burgess, who apparently lost his nerve at the last moment and went with him), Kim Philby’s cover was blown. Forced by SIS to resign in July of 1951, he ended up working as Middle East correspondent for two London newspapers,
The Observer
and
The Economist
, in Beirut. After he, in turn, fled to the Soviet Union in 1963, Angleton let drop hints to his CIA colleagues that there was more to the Philby story than met the eye. The suggestion was obviously self-serving. But was there more?

Teddy Kollek died on 2 January 2007.

The mystery of Philby’s ultimate loyalty lives on.

PRINCIPAL PERSONAGES IN THIS BOOK

Yelina Modinskaya:
Soviet intelligence analyst charged with reviewing the Englishman’s dossier,
Committee for State Security case file no. 5581
.

Litzi Friedman:
Hungarian-born Communist activist, agent for Moscow Centre in Vienna at the time Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss crushed the Austrian Socialists and Communists in 1934.

Harold Adrian Russell Philby:
Young Cambridge University Marxist—nicknamed Kim after Kipling’s legendary fictional spy—who turned up in Vienna in 1933 looking for adventure, a cause to believe in, comradeship, affection, love, sex.

Guy Burgess:
Kim’s brilliant, unconventional leftist classmate at Trinity College, Cambridge, who took a visceral pleasure in flaunting his homosexuality.

Teodor Stepanovich Maly:
Moscow Centre’s London
Rezident
who, using the pseudonym Otto, recruited the Englishman, offering him a clandestine alternative to calling out
Daily Worker
headlines to illiterate coal miners.

Miss Evelyn Sinclair:
The Admiral’s spinster daughter who knew the location of her father’s dead letterboxes and was considered to be the institutional memory of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.

Harry St John Bridger Philby:
Kim Philby’s eccentric father, nicknamed the Hajj, who converted to Islam and went to live in Arabia, but kept up with his old school chums in London.

Frances Doble:
Bunny to her friends, Canadian film and theater actress who starred in Nöel Coward’s
Sirocco
but really came into her own at after-theater champagne parties; an ardent royalist, she favored Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the belief that he would restore her friend the exiled King Alfonso to the throne.

Miss Marjorie Maxse:
Veteran recruiter for His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, spinster in her seventies who could whistle through her fingers to flag down a hackney carriage and was disconcertingly direct when vetting prospective espionage agents.

Anatoly Gorsky:
the NKVD man who succeeded Otto as London
Rezident
and ran the Cambridge agents, including Kim Philby.

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