The Pigeon Tunnel (19 page)

Of the lunch, I remember little. That is to say, I have no recollection of what we ate or drank, but no doubt it was exquisite. We sat at a long table, thirty-odd of us including the misty grey army, in a medieval penthouse of celestial beauty. President Francesco Cossiga, a depressed-looking man in tinted spectacles, sat with bowed shoulders at its centre. Despite the assurances of his Cultural Attaché in London, he appeared to have little English. A lady interpreter was on hand to demonstrate her skills, which became redundant when we settled on French. It was soon evident that she wasn't interpreting for the two of us alone, but for the grey army either side of us.

I don't remember handing over the calf-bound book a second time, though I must have done. Only the general topic of our conversation remains with me, since it was not about literature or art or architecture or politics, but spies, and it came in a series of sudden and unpredictable charges each time Cossiga raised his head and stared at me with unsettling intensity through his tinted spectacles.

Could societies do without spies altogether? he wished to know. What did
I
think? How was a supposed democracy to control its spies? How should
Italy
control them? – as if Italy were a separate case, not a democracy but just
Italy
in italics. What was my opinion, bluntly, in my own words please, of the Italian intelligence services
en général?
Were they worth their salt? Were they a negative force or a positive one, would I say?

To all of which I had, and still have, no answer worth a bean. I knew nothing about the workings of the Italian intelligence services. I noticed as I trotted out such wisdoms as I could muster that every time the President fired a question at me, the grey army around us
stopped eating and raised their heads as if to the command of a conductor's baton, only resuming when I had ground to a halt.

Suddenly the President had gone. Perhaps he'd had enough of me. Perhaps he had the world to run. He bounded to his feet, vouchsafed me another piercing glance, shook my hand and left me to my fellow guests.

Servants ushered us to an adjoining room where coffee and liqueurs awaited. Still nobody spoke. Seated in soft chairs round a low table, the grey-suited men exchanged only a muttered word with one another, as if they feared to be overheard; and with me, no word at all. Then, one by one, with a handshake and a nod, each took his leave.

It wasn't till I returned to London that I was informed, by people who should know, that I had lunched with the assembled chieftains of Italy's many intelligence services. Cossiga had evidently thought they could pick up a few hints from the horse's mouth. Mortified, embarrassed, feeling a fool, I made enquiries about my host, only to learn what I should have learned before I set out for Messrs Sangorski & Sutcliffe.

President Cossiga, having on his election declared himself the father of his nation, had become its scourge. He had lashed out so vigorously against former colleagues of left and right that he had acquired the nickname ‘pickaxe-man'. He was given to maintaining that Italy was a country of the insane.

A radically conservative Roman Catholic who saw communism as the anti-Christ, Cossiga went to his reward in 2010. In old age, according to his obituary in the
Guardian
, he got battier still. It is not recorded whether he ever benefited from my advice, whatever that was.

Mrs Thatcher also invited me to lunch. Her office wished to recommend me for a medal, and I had declined. I had not voted for her, but that fact had nothing to do with my decision. I felt, as I feel today,
that I was not cut out for our honours system, that it represents much of what I most dislike about our country and that we were better apart, and finally, if there has to be a finally, that since I had no regard for our British literary commentariat, I consequently had none for its selections, even if they included me. In my letter of reply, I took care to assure the Prime Minister's office that my churlishness did not spring from any personal or political animosity, offered my thanks and compliments to the Prime Minister, and assumed I would hear no more.

I was wrong. In a second letter her office struck a more intimate note. Lest I was regretting a decision taken in heat, the writer wished me to know that the door to an honour was still open. I replied, equally courteously I hope, that as far as I was concerned the door was firmly shut, and would remain so in any similar contingency. Again, my thanks. Again, my compliments to the Prime Minister. And again I assumed the matter was closed, until a third letter arrived, inviting me to lunch.

There were six tables set in the dining room of 10 Downing Street that day, but I only remember ours, which had Mrs Thatcher at its head and the Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers on her right, and myself in a tight new grey suit on her left. The year must have been 1982. I was just back from the Middle East, Lubbers had just been appointed. Our other three guests remain a pink blob to me. I assumed, for reasons that today escape me, that they were industrialists from the north. Neither do I remember any opening exchanges between the six of us, but perhaps they had happened over cocktails before we sat down. But I do remember Mrs Thatcher turning to the Dutch Prime Minister, and acquainting him with my distinction.

‘
Now
, Mr Lubbers,' she announced in a tone to prepare him for a nice surprise. ‘This is Mr
Cornwell
, but
you
will know him better as the writer John le Carré.'

Leaning forward, Mr Lubbers took a close look at me. He had a youthful face, almost a playful one. He smiled, I smiled: really friendly smiles.

‘No,' he said.

And sat back in his chair, still smiling.

But Mrs Thatcher, it is well known, did not lightly take no for an answer.

‘Oh,
come
, Mr Lubbers. You've heard of
John le Carré.
He wrote
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, and . . .' – fumbling slightly – ‘... other wonderful books.'

Lubbers, nothing if not a politician, reconsidered his position. Again he leaned forward and took another, longer look at me, as amiable as the first, but more considered, more statesmanlike.

‘
No
,' he repeated.

And evidently satisfied that he had made the correct finding, again sat back.

Now it was Mrs Thatcher's turn to take a long look at me, and I underwent something of what her all-male
*
cabinet must have experienced when they too incurred her displeasure.

‘
Well
, Mr Cornwell,' she said, as to an errant schoolboy who had been brought to account. ‘Since you're
here
' – implying that I had somehow talked my way in – ‘have you anything you wish to say to me?'

Belatedly, it occurred to me that I had indeed something to say to her, if badly. Having recently returned from South Lebanon, I felt obliged to plead the cause of stateless Palestinians. Lubbers listened. The gentlemen from the industrial north listened. But Mrs Thatcher listened more attentively than all of them, and with no sign of the impatience of which she was frequently accused. Even when I had stumbled to the end of my aria, she went on listening before delivering herself of her response.

‘Don't give me
sob stories
,' she ordered me with sudden vehemence, striking the key words for emphasis. ‘Every day people appeal to my
emotions.
You can't
govern
that way. It simply isn't
fair.
'

Whereupon, appealing to my emotions, she reminded me that it was the Palestinians who had trained the
IRA
bombers who had murdered her friend Airey Neave, the British war hero and politician, and her close adviser. After that, I don't believe we spoke to each other much. I expect that, very sensibly, she preferred to devote herself to Mr Lubbers and her industrialists.

Occasionally I do ask myself whether Mrs Thatcher nevertheless had an ulterior motive in inviting me. Was she, for instance, sizing me up for one of her quangos – those strange quasi-official public bodies that have authority but no power, or is it the other way round?

But I found it hard to imagine what possible use she could have for me – unless of course she wanted guidance from the horse's mouth on how to sort out her squabbling spies.

24

His brother's keeper

I hesitated before including Nicholas Elliott's account of his relationship with his friend and fellow spy, the British traitor Kim Philby. My first reason: as it stands, his account is a fiction that he has come to believe, rather than the objective truth; and my second, whatever Philby means to my generation, his name may not resonate so loudly in the ears of the present one. But in the end I couldn't resist offering it, shorn of its expository passages, as a window on the British espionage establishment in the post-war years, on its class assumptions and its mind-set.

The scale of Philby's betrayal is barely imaginable to anyone who has not been in the business. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured and shot. Those who had not been betrayed by Philby were betrayed by George Blake, another
MI
6 double agent.

I had always had a bee in my bonnet about Philby, and as I have reported elsewhere it had led me into a public dispute with his friend Graham Greene, which I regretted, and with such luminaries as Hugh Trevor-Roper, which I didn't regret at all. For them, Philby was just another brilliant child of the thirties, a decade that belonged to them and not to us. Forced to choose between capitalism on the one hand – to leftists of the day synonymous with fascism – and the New Dawn of communism on the other, he had opted for communism, whereas Greene had opted for Catholicism and Trevor-Roper for neither. And all right, Philby's decision happened to be hostile to Western interests, but it was his to take, and he was entitled to it. End of argument.

To me, on the other hand, Philby's motive for betraying his
country smacked a great deal more of an addiction to deceit. What may have begun as an ideological commitment became a psychological dependency, then a craving. One side wasn't enough for him. He needed to play the world's game. It therefore came as no surprise to me to read, in Ben Macintyre's excellent portrayal of the Philby–Elliott friendship,
*
that when Philby was in limbo in Beirut, living out the inglorious end of his career as an
MI
6 and
KGB
agent and fearing that his Soviet controllers had given up on him, what he missed most, apart from watching cricket, was the prickle of the double life that had for so long sustained him.

Has my animosity towards Philby mellowed over the years? Not that I'm aware of. There is a type of entitled Briton who, while deploring the sins of imperialism, attaches himself to the next great imperial power in the delusion that he can steer its destiny. Philby, I believe, was such a man. In conversation with his biographer, Phil Knightley, he apparently wondered aloud why I nursed a grudge against him. I can only reply that, like Philby, I knew a thing or two about the conflicting storms aroused by a maverick father, but there are better ways of punishing society.

Enter now Nicholas Elliott, Philby's most loyal friend, confidant and devoted brother-in-arms in war and peace, child of Eton, son of its former headmaster, adventurer, alpinist and dupe – and surely the most entertaining spy I ever met. In retrospect, he also remains the most enigmatic. To describe his appearance is, these days, to invite ridicule. He was a sparkling bon vivant of the old school. I never once saw him in anything but an immaculately cut, dark three-piece suit. He was thin as a wand, and seemed always to hover slightly above the ground at a jaunty angle, a quiet smile on his face and one elbow cocked for the martini glass or cigarette. His waistcoats curved inwards, never outwards. He looked like a P. G. Wodehouse man-about-town, and spoke like one, with the difference that his conversation was startlingly forthright, knowledgeable and recklessly disrespectful of
authority. I never got the wrong side of him to my knowledge, but not for nothing did Tiny Rowland, one of the City of London's tougher nuts, describe him as ‘the Harry Lime of Cheapside'.

Among the many extraordinary things that Elliott had done in his life, however, the most extraordinary and undoubtedly the most painful was to sit face to face in Beirut with his close friend, colleague and mentor Kim Philby, and hear him admit that he had been a Soviet spy for all the years that they had known each other.

During my own years in
MI
6, Elliott and I had been on nodding terms at most. When I was first interviewed for the Service, he was on the selection board. When I became a new entrant, he was a fifth-floor grandee whose espionage coups were held up to trainees as examples of what a resourceful field officer could achieve. Flitting elegantly in and out of Head Office from the Middle East, he would deliver a lecture, attend an operational conference and be gone.

I resigned from the Service in 1964 at the age of thirty-three, having made a negligible contribution. Elliott resigned in 1969, aged fifty-three, having been central to every major operation that the Service had undertaken since the outbreak of the Second World War. Intermittently, we kept in touch. He was frustrated by our former Service's refusal to let him reveal secrets that in his opinion had long ago passed their keep-by date. He believed he had a right, indeed a duty, to give his story to posterity. Perhaps that's where he thought I might come in – as some sort of go-between or cut-out who would help him get his unique exploits out into the open where they belonged.

So it happened that one evening in May 1986 in my house in Hampstead, twenty-three years after he had received Philby's partial confession, he poured out his heart to me in what turned out to be the first in a succession of such meetings. While he talked I scribbled in a notebook. Looking over my notes some three decades later – handwritten, fading notepaper, a rusty staple at one corner – I
am comforted that there is hardly a crossing out. At some point in our discussions I tried to enlist his collaboration in a two-handed play starring Kim and Nicholas, but the real Elliott would have none of it.

‘May we not ever again think about
the play
,' he wrote to me in 1991. And today, thanks to Ben Macintyre, I'm thoroughly glad we didn't, because what Elliott was telling me was not the story, but the cover story of his life. No amount of the caustic levity that was his stock-in-trade was going to take away the pain of knowing that the man to whom he had unreservedly entrusted his most intimate personal and professional secrets had, from the very first day of their long friendship, betrayed him to the Soviet enemy.

Elliott on Philby:

‘Terrific charmer, with an impulse to shock. I knew him terribly well, especially the family. I really cared for them. I never knew a fellow like him for getting pissed. I'd interrogate him, he'd drink Scotch the whole time, I'd literally have to load him into a cab to send him home. Give the driver five quid to cart him upstairs. Took him to a dinner party once. Charmed everyone, then suddenly he started talking about his hostess's tits. Said she had the best breasts in the Service. Totally off-colour. I mean you don't, at a dinner party, start talking about your hostess's tits. But that's how he was. Liked to shock. I knew the father too. I had him to dinner in Beirut the night he died. Fascinating chap. Talked endlessly about his relationship with Ibn Saud.
*
Eleanor, Philby's third wife, adored him. The old boy managed to make a pass at someone's wife, then left. A few hours later he'd died. Last words were “God I'm bored.”'

‘My interrogation of Philby lasted a long time. The one in Beirut was the end of a series. We had two sources. One was a pretty good defector. The other was this mother figure. The Office shrink had told me about her. He rang me up, the shrink. He'd been treating Aileen, Philby's second wife, and he said, “She's released me from my Hippocratic Oath. I've got to talk to you.” So I went and saw him and he told me Philby was homosexual. Never mind all his philandering, never mind that Aileen, whom I knew pretty well, said Philby liked his sex and was pretty good at it. He was homosexual, all part of a syndrome, and the psychiatrist, on no evidence he knew of, was also convinced he was bad. Working for the Russians. Or something. He couldn't be precise but he was sure of it. He advised me to look for a mother figure. Somewhere there'll be a mother figure, he said. It was this woman Solomon.
*
Jewish woman. She was working in Marks & Spencer's, a buyer or something. They'd been communists together. She was angry with Philby over the Jewish thing. Philby had been working for Colonel Teague, who was Head of Station in Jerusalem, and Teague was anti-Jewish, and she was angry. So she told us some things about him. The old communist connection. Five [
MI
5] were running the case by then, and I passed it all on to Five – get the mother figure, Solomon. Wouldn't listen of course, they're too bureaucratic.'

‘People were so
naughty
about Philby. Sinclair and Menzies [former Chiefs of
MI
6] – well, they just wouldn't listen to anything against him.'