The Pigeon Tunnel (20 page)

‘So this cable came, saying they had the proof, and I cabled back to White [Sir Dick White, former Director General of
MI
5 now Chief
of
MI
6] saying I must go and confront him. It had been an ongoing thing for so long, and I owed it to the family to get it out of him. Feel? Well, I don't think I'm an emotional sort of chap, much, but I was fond of his women and children, and I always had the feeling that Philby himself would like to get the whole thing off his chest and settle down and follow cricket, which was what he loved. He knew cricket averages backwards and forwards. He could recite cricket till the cows came home. So Dick White said okay. Go. So I flew to Beirut and I saw him and I said to him, if you're as intelligent as I think you are, and for the sake of your family, you'll come clean, because the game is up. Anyway we could never have nailed him in court, he'd have denied it. Between you and me the deal was perfectly simple. He had to make a clean breast of it, which I thought he wanted to do anyway, which was where he fooled me, and he had to give us everything, but
everything
on damage. That was paramount. The damage limitation. After all, I mean one of the things the
KGB
would have been asking him was, who can we approach independently of you, who's in the Service, who might work for us? He might have suggested people. We had to know all that. Then whatever else he'd given them. We were completely firm on that.'

My notes resort to straight dialogue:

Self: ‘So what were your sanctions if he didn't cooperate?'

Elliott: ‘What's that, old boy?'

‘Your sanctions, Nick, what you could threaten him with in the extreme case. Could you have him sandbagged, for instance, and flown to London?'

‘Nobody wanted him in London, old boy.'

‘Well, what about the ultimate sanction then – forgive me – could you have him killed, liquidated?'

‘My dear chap. One of us.'

‘So what
could
you do?'

‘I told him, the alternative was a
total
cut-off. There wouldn't be an embassy, a consulate, a legation, in the whole of the Middle East that would have the first bloody thing to do with him. The business
community wouldn't touch him, his journalistic career would be dead in the water. He'd have been a leper. His whole life would have been over. It never even crossed my mind he'd go to Moscow. He'd done this one thing in the past, he wanted it out of the way, so he'd got to come clean. After that we'd forget it. What about his family and Eleanor?'

I mention the fate of one of Britain's less socially favoured traitors who gave away far less than Philby but spent years in prison for it.

‘Ah well,
Vassall
*
 – well, he wasn't top league, was he?'

Elliott resumes:

‘That was the first session and we agreed to meet again at four o'clock and at four o'clock he turned up with a confession, sheets of it, eight or nine closely typed pages of stuff, on the damage, on everything, masses of it. Then he says, you could do me a favour actually. Eleanor knows you're in town. She doesn't know anything about me. But if you don't come round for a drink she'll smell a rat. So I say all right, for Eleanor's sake I'll come round and have a drink with you. But first of all I've got to encode this stuff and cable it to Dick White, which I did. When I got to his place for a drink, he'd passed out. Pissed. Lying on the floor. Eleanor and I had to put him to bed. She took his head, I took his feet. He never said anything when he was pissed. Never spoke a loose word in his life, far as I know. So I told her. I said to her, “You know what this is about, don't you?” She said, “No,” so I said, “He's a bloody Russian spy.” He'd told me she hadn't rumbled him, and he was right. So I went home to London and left him to Peter Lunn
*
to carry on the interrogation. Dick White had
handled the case jolly well, but he hadn't said a word to the Americans. So I had to dash over to Washington and tell them. Poor old Jim Angleton.
*
He'd made such a fuss of Philby when he was head of the Service's station in Washington, and when Angleton found out – when I told him, that is – he sort of went all the other way. I had dinner with him just a few days ago.'

‘My theory is, you see, that one day the
KGB
will publish the rest of Philby's autobiography. The first book sort of cut itself dead at 1947. My guess is, they've got another book in their locker. One of the things Philby
has
told them is to polish up their goons. Make 'em dress properly, smell less. Sophisticated. They're a totally different-looking crowd these days. Smart as hell, smooth, first-class chaps. Philby's work, that was, you bet your boots. No, we never thought of killing him. He fooled me though. I thought he wanted to stay where he was.'

‘You know, looking back though – don't you agree? – at all the things we got up to – all right we had some belly-laughs – my God we had some belly-laughs – we were terribly amateurish, in a way. I mean those lines through the Caucasus, agents going in and out, it was so
amateurish.
Well, he betrayed Volkov, of course, and they killed him.
*
So when Philby wrote to me and invited me to go and meet
him in Berlin or Helsinki, and not tell my wife Elizabeth or Dick White, I wrote back and told him to put some flowers on Volkov's grave for me. I thought that was rather good.

‘I mean, who the
hell
did he think I was, not telling them? The first person I'd tell was Elizabeth, and
immediately
after that, I'd tell Dick White. I'd been out to dinner with Gehlen – did you know Gehlen?
*
 – came back late at night, and there was this plain envelope on the doormat with “Nick” written on it. Dropped in by hand. “If you can come, send me a postcard with Nelson's Column on it for Helsinki, Horse Guards for Berlin,” some damned thing. Who the hell did he think I was? The Albanian operation?
*
Well yes, he probably blew that too. I mean we had some fucking good assets in Russia too in the old days. Don't know what happened to them either. Then he wants to meet me because he's lonely. Well of course he's lonely. He shouldn't have gone. He fooled me. I've written about him. The Sherwood Press. The big publishers all wanted me to write about the interrogation, but I wouldn't. It's more for one's climbing friends, a memoir.
*
You can't write about the Office. Interrogation's an art. You understand that. It went on over a long time. Where was I?'

Sometimes Elliott drifted off into reminiscences of other cases that he had been involved in. The most significant was that of Oleg Penkovsky, a
GRU
colonel who provided the West with vital Soviet
defence secrets in the run-up to the Cuba missile crisis. Elliott was infuriated by a book concocted by the
CIA
as a piece of Cold War propaganda and published under the title
The Penkovsky Papers.

‘Frightful book. Made out the fellow was some kind of saint or hero. He was nothing of the sort, he'd been passed over and he was pissed off. The Americans turned him down but Shergy
*
knew he was all right. Shergy had the nose. We couldn't have been less similar but we got on marvellously.
Les extrêmes se touchent.
I was in charge of Ops, Shergy was my number two. Marvellous field man, very sensitive, almost never wrong. He'd been right about Philby too, from very early. Shergold looked Penkovsky over and thought yes, so we took him on. Very brave thing, in spying, to put your faith in someone. Any fool can go back to his desk and say, “I don't altogether trust this chap. On the one hand, on the other hand.” It takes a lot of guts to take a flyer and say, “I believe in him.” That's what Shergy did, and we went along with him. Women. Penkovsky had these whores in Paris, we laid them on, and he complained he couldn't do anything with them: once a night and that was it. We had to send the Office doctor out to Paris to give him a shot in the bum so that he could get it up. You do get some belly-laughs, they were what one lived for sometimes. These marvellous belly-laughs. I mean how could you crack up Penkovsky to be a hero? Mind you, betrayal takes courage. You have to hand it to Philby too. He had courage. Shergy resigned once. He was frightfully temperamental. I came in, found his resignation on my desk. “In view of the fact that Dick White” – he put
CSS
[Chief of the Secret Service] of course – “has passed information to the Americans without my consent, and has therefore endangered my very sensitive source, I wish to resign as an example to other members of the Service” – something like that. White apologized and Shergy took back his resignation. I had to talk him round
though. Wasn't easy. Very temperamental chap. But a marvellous field man. And he got Penkovsky dead right. Artist.'