Art of Betrayal (13 page)

For all his success, Philby had not always been trusted by his KGB mentors. They had refused to believe him when he said that MI6 had no agents in Russia, and the fact that MI6 appeared so incompetent in failing to spot his Communist past added to suspicions that he might be a double agent whose allegiance remained with Britain and who was being used against them. At one point contact with him was terminated and a rather inept surveillance team sent out to see if Philby and those he recruited (with the possible exception of Maclean) really were loyal to British intelligence.
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Although he hid them carefully in his untrustworthy memoir, Philby himself had doubts, particularly when he was abandoned and at the start of the war when the Soviet Union signed a short-lived pact with the Nazis. But, once embarked on, the path of treachery is almost impossible to leave. Philby remained steadfast. Some say it was deceit itself and the thrill of the double life which drove him rather than a faith in Communism. In later life he denied that his commitment was anything other than ideological. He had chosen his side and then stuck with it, he said, quoting a line from his friend Graham Greene's book,
The Confidential Agent
, in which the agent defends himself for backing the poor even when their leaders commit atrocities like those of the other side. ‘You've got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all … It's no worse – is it? – than my country, right or wrong. You choose your side once and for all – of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.'
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Philby particularly hated being called a ‘double agent' in the popular sense of the term implying someone who had changed sides. He always saw himself as a ‘Soviet intelligence officer' for whom the struggle against fascism extended into a struggle against imperialism.
‘All through my career, I have been a straight penetration agent working in the Soviet interest.'
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The burden of betrayal, however, did not perhaps sit as lightly on Philby as he, and his critics, would make out.

He was so successful as a penetration agent that some thought Kim was destined to become chief of MI6. That was partly because the competition was not up to much. ‘Sometimes, in the early weeks, I felt that perhaps I had not made the grade after all,' Philby says of his early days in the Second World War. ‘It seemed that somewhere, lurking in deep shadow, there must be another service, really secret and really powerful.' Fellow wartime MI6 officer Hugh Trevor-Roper thought Philby a candidate for the top. ‘Who else of his generation was there? … I looked around the world I had left, at the part-time stockbrokers and retired Indian policemen, the agreeable epicureans from the bars of White's and Boodle's, the jolly, conventional ex-naval officers and the robust adventurers from the bucket-shop; and then I looked at Philby.'
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McCargar says Angleton told him that Kim might yet become chief even after the first allegations had surfaced.
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Philby himself was more realistic, understanding that the number-two spot was more likely thanks to his complicated personal life, which featured women and too much drink even for the 1950s.

But then in 1951 he found himself out of a job and without a purpose. He floated around the City and journalism for a few years. Then a Russian defector in Australia revealed that Burgess and Maclean had been long-term penetration agents who had been tipped off by a ‘third man'. The pressure was back on. The Americans, especially FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been a guest at Philby's house, were convinced of his guilt and angry about their British cousins' perceived protection of him. Along with some MI5 officers, they made sure that friends in the newspapers got hold of his name. Ironically, MI6 officers would be furious with the Americans for the leaking of Philby's name, seeing it as the unacceptable smearing of one of their own. Philby was on a train, undertaking the long process of getting rid of any surveillance in preparation for meeting his Soviet contact, when he saw a copy of the
Evening Standard
newspaper. In October 1955 an MP had asked the Prime Minister Anthony Eden ‘how long he was going to go on shielding the “dubious Third Man activities of Mr Philby'”.
⁸⁰
By a strange quirk of
fate, the title of Graham Greene's screenplay was now applied to the man who, unbeknown to anyone, may have helped inspire it.

The establishment rallied round. Philby had survived another bout of questioning by his former colleagues at MI6, one which his pursuers at MI5 thought absurdly polite and non-confrontational as if MI6 were trying to help him clear his name. ‘To call it an interrogation would be a travesty,' said an MI5 officer.
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The Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, stood up in the House of Commons in November and said there was no evidence that Philby had betrayed the interests of his country. Philby hosted a bravura press conference in his mother's flat in London. For five minutes flash bulbs illuminated the scene almost continuously before the questioning began.

‘Were you in fact the Third Man?'

‘No, I was not.'

‘Do you think there was one?'

‘No comment.'

Each question was met with a brief, clipped answer.

‘Mr Macmillan said you had had Communist associations. Is that why you were asked to resign?'

‘I was asked to resign from the Foreign Office because of an imprudent association with Burgess and as a result of his disappearance.'

‘Can you say when your Communist associations ended? I assume they did.'

‘The last time I spoke to a Communist knowing he was a Communist was some time in 1934.'

There was no sign of a stammer. The only suggestion of something amiss were a few hairs which had not quite been Brylcreemed into position.

‘Would you still regard Burgess, who lived with you for a while in Washington, as a friend of yours? How do you feel about him now?'

‘I consider his action deplorable. On the subject of friendship I'd prefer to say as little as possible because it's very complicated.'
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He then served the assembled hacks beer and sherry. The following day his friends from MI6 called to congratulate him. The next summer Philby, now effectively in the clear, received a phone call from Nicholas Elliott.

‘Something unpleasant again?' Philby said

‘Maybe just the opposite,' Elliott replied.

Philby's old chums, George Kennedy Young and Nicholas Elliott, had got him a job in Beirut. Officially he was a journalist for the
Economist
and the
Observer.
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But he was also a salaried agent of the service (an agent who would be handled by an officer rather than an officer in his own right who could recruit agents). The Americans were never told he had been put back on the payroll and were unhappy when they later found out. Philby arrived in the Lebanon in August 1956. He would find a new life as a spy in a city which lay at the centre of much of the plotting and scheming of a turbulent Middle East. But, even without being aware of their grievous error in sending him there, Philby's two friends in MI6 were going through dark times.

The mid-1950s came to be known as ‘the horrors' by the MI6 officers who lived through those years. The wildmen known within the service as the Robber Barons championed aggressive covert operations but were coming unstuck in a spectacular and occasionally grisly way. The emerging myth of James Bond met its counterpoint in the sad tale of Lionel ‘Buster' Crabb. In April 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a high-profile trip to Britain on board the state-of-the-art cruiser the
Ordzhonikidze
. This was an important visit for Anthony Eden who wanted to play the statesman in the new, friendlier, post-Stalin era. The MI6 London station – run by Nicholas Elliott with Andrew King as his deputy – decided that the visit was too good an opportunity to miss and ten days beforehand put up a list of six operations to MI6's Foreign Office adviser. The Admiralty had been particularly keen to understand the underwater-noise characteristics of the Soviet vessels.
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The placing of a Foreign Office adviser inside MI6 was part of a drive to put the service on a somewhat tighter leash, but when an MI6 officer ambled into his office for a ten-minute chat about the plans, the adviser came away thinking they would then be cleared at a higher level (as some sensitive operations were) while Elliott and his colleagues assumed that the quick conversation constituted clearance. The problem was that the Prime Minister had explicitly ordered that no risky operations were to be carried out and had already vetoed a number of plans (including bugging Claridge's Hotel where the Soviets were staying and another operation involving a catamaran).
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The operation bore all the hallmarks of the over-confident amateurishness
of the period. Crabb was an ageing frogman who had an impressive, but increasingly distant, war record foiling attacks on Allied shipping with daring dives. He was now, like others, well past his prime and living on the legends of the past. His private life was a mess with a failed marriage, gambling, drink and depression. Diving and secret work were his escape and he begged to be allowed to undertake one more mission.
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Crabb and a young MI6 officer checked into a local hotel under their real names and Crabb slugged back five double whiskies the night before the dive.
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Where Bond battled the bad guys in the crystal-clear Caribbean, the diminutive Crabb plunged into the cold, muddy tide of Portsmouth Harbour just before seven in the morning. He had about ninety minutes of air and by 9.15 it was clear something had gone wrong. For a while, it looked like the whole affair might be hushed up. The MI6 officer went back to the hotel to rip out the registration page. The hotel owner went to the press, who sniffed a good story.
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The disappearance of a well-known hero could not be covered up.

The Prime Minister, who for weeks was not even told of Crabb's disappearance, was furious when the story broke, taking MI6's recklessness and amateurishness as a personal affront.
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He was so angry that he broke with the normal ‘neither confirm nor deny' rule over intelligence operations and told the Commons, ‘I think it is necessary, in the special circumstances of this case, to make it clear that what was done was done without the authority or knowledge of Her Majesty's Ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.'
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Elliott, to cover his own failings, blamed the politicians. ‘A storm in a teacup was blown up by ineptitude into a major diplomatic incident … he [Eden] flew into a tantrum because he had not been consulted and a series of misleading statements were put out which simply had the effect of stimulating public speculation.' Others thought Elliott was responsible for a veritable ‘one man Bay of Pigs'.
⁹¹
A few wondered whether there had been a leak about the operation and if so from where. Just over a year later, a fisherman saw a black object floating thirty yards away in the water which looked like a tractor tyre. When he pulled it out with a hook he realised it was a headless, decaying corpse in a black frogman's suit.
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Crabb's ex-wife could not even identify what was left, fuelling wild speculation that Crabb had defected or been abducted and taken to the Soviet Union. Decades
later, a Soviet frogman would claim that a tip-off from a British spy meant that he had been lying in wait. Fearing that Crabb was planting a mine to blow up the ship, the frogman says he swam up from below to slash Crabb's air tubes and then his throat with a knife. The body was so small he at first thought it belonged to a boy. But he then found himself staring into the dying eyes of a middle-aged man. According to his unconfirmed account, he pushed the body away into the undercurrents, leaving a trail of blood.
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The reflection in the mirror held up before MI6 by the Crabb incident was not lean Bond but a drink-addled frogman doing something stupid on a semi-freelance basis. It was not pretty.

The scandal was the last straw for the hapless Chief of the Service, John ‘Sinbad' Sinclair. His weakness had led the Robber Barons to bypass him and all effective oversight: ‘Where I felt if [a proposed operation] went any further somebody would say no – and I was quite certain of my judgement to carry out the operation – [you] simply tell them afterwards,' George Kennedy Young later said.
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In a sign of just how far patience had worn thin with the cowboys, the service suffered the ignominy of having the head of MI5 sent to straighten things out. The new C, Dick White, walked down the dusty, decaying corridors of MI6 headquarters in Broadway and found a place haunted by the ghosts of the past. ‘We're still cloak and dagger. Fisticuffs. Too many swashbuckling green thumbs thinking we're about to fight another Second World War,' one of his senior officers told him.
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With the penchant for risk-tasking came an arrogance – a belief that they were the true guardians of the nation and its values – epitomised in a statement attributed to Young. In a world of increasing lawlessness, cruelty and corruption, he said, ‘it is the spy who has been called upon to remedy the situation created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests … these days the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.'
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The pendulum had swung too far towards risky, gung-ho operations and White began a purge to instil more professionalism. To protect his flank he later promoted Young to be his deputy, a move he would regret. Young, as head of the Middle East desk, had been involved in plotting the 1953 coup in Iran to remove the nationalist, but democratically elected, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh,
in concert with the CIA, a task which seemed to confirm that aggressive, covert political action could be a powerful tool. Mossadegh had thumbed his nose at the British by trying to reclaim control of his country's oil and the British had managed to persuade the Americans to help get rid of him. In the long term, like almost every action of its type, the coup proved to be a disaster as the Shah of Iran subsequently veered towards authoritarianism and the Iranian people blamed, and continue to blame, the British and Americans for their plight, both powers gaining a reputation for conspiring and manipulating in the Middle East (a reputation which British intelligence continues to have in many countries, in part thanks to Britain's colonial history of such entanglements). But at the time the taste for covert action had become intoxicating, a tempting panacea to mask the bitter reality that both political and economic power were rapidly ebbing away from Britain.
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The spies hoped that with their tricks and coups they could magically preserve Britain's status through a kind of clandestine sleight of hand.