The Lies of the Land Page 3
So instead they chose to blind themselves to the truth. Philby had volunteered to spy for the Russians long before he ‘dropped a few hints here and there’ and bagged himself a berth at MI6 in 1940. The background checks done at the time of his recruitment turned up the result ‘nothing recorded against’: a chat with his father, an adviser to the king of Saudi Arabia, had been enough to convince recruiters that his flirtations with communism at Cambridge in the thirties were ‘all schoolboy nonsense. He’s a reformed character now.’ Besides, no less a figure than MI6’s deputy head, Valentine Vivian, had provided a reference of the most unquestionable kind: ‘I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people.’27
Philby in turn had passed Burgess and Maclean’s details on to the NKVD, precursor to the KGB. And it was he who had tipped off his Soviet contact in the US that Maclean’s cover had been blown, and he who arranged for Burgess to get Maclean to the extraction point. When Philby realized Burgess, to whom he was directly and obviously connected, had gone too, he had considered fleeing himself. In the end, he had decided to stay put and bluff.
He had come close to discovery before and got away with it. In 1937, when he was still filing reports on the Spanish Civil War for The Times as well as more secret ones for Moscow, a defector had described a ‘young Englishman, a journalist of a good family’ who was out in Spain, but no one made the connection. In 1945 Konstantin Volkov, the deputy chief of Soviet intelligence in Turkey, announced to staff at the British embassy that he wanted to come across too, and offered a list of Russian agents in Britain which he said included ‘one fulfilling the functions of head of a section of the British counter-espionage service in London’, a description which Philby swiftly recognized as himself. That time, he had been in a position to do something about it: the report about Volkov landed on his own desk at Section IX, which was dedicated to the ‘professional handling of any cases coming to our notice involving communists or people concerned in Soviet espionage’. He arranged to go to Istanbul himself to extract Volkov and his wife. Naturally, he made sure that the Russians got there first, and the couple were spirited away to Moscow where they were tortured and killed. A ‘ “nasty piece of work” who “deserved what he got” ’ was Philby’s considered, and psychopathic, opinion.28
His dual lives continued along weirdly parallel lines: in 1946 he was awarded both the OBE and the Soviet Order of the Red Banner in recognition of his work for the country’s respective secret services. By then he was even being talked about as a future head of MI6, not least by his biggest fan, Sir Stewart Menzies, who currently held the role of ‘C’. As a stepping stone on the way he was sent to Washington to serve as MI6’s ‘linkman’ with the newly created CIA. This gave him complete access to the secret communications between Britain and America. Immediately, a great many bilateral operations started to go wrong: agents working in Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and Armenia disappeared in mysterious circumstances, while CIA-funded insurgents in Albania were picked up by secret police who seemed to already know the details of their plans. It is estimated that Philby’s actions directly resulted in the deaths of up to two hundred guerrillas in Albania, plus thousands of their relatives and associates. He just shrugged. ‘They knew the risks they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union and those interests required that these men were defeated. To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.’29
This was the man MI6 closed ranks to protect. But they couldn’t keep him on, they sadly concluded. His association with Burgess was just too close, and, now that MI5 had actually bothered to look properly, they had discovered all sorts of other dubious things about him – such as the fact he had not only moved to Vienna in 1933 to hang out with revolutionaries, but actually married one of them, Litzi Kohlmann. Nonetheless, Menzies had personally assured his MI5 counterpart, Sir Dick White, that his protégé could ‘not possibly be a traitor’.30 He made it clear to Philby that he was leaving with honour, awarding him a generous £4,000 payoff. Newly unemployed, he retreated to a cottage in the countryside. MI5, still suspicious, bugged his phones. All they heard were a series of calls from former MI6 colleagues wanting to commiserate.
The whereabouts of Burgess and Maclean became the subject of frenzied speculation in the summer of 1954, after a KGB colonel defected in Australia and claimed to have evidence not just that the pair were living in the Soviet Union, but that they had been tipped off about Maclean’s imminent arrest by a ‘third man’ who was a British official. MI5 and MI6 both started lobbying the foreign secretary: MI5 urging him to go public in the hope of flushing out Philby; MI6 assuring him the whole thing was just a vendetta got up by their domestic rivals. Menzies’ successor as ‘C’, Sir John Sinclair, blustered: ‘It is entirely contrary to the English tradition for a man to have to prove his innocence… in a case where the prosecution has nothing but suspicion to go upon.’31
Across the Atlantic, the bombastic and deeply peculiar head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had got a bug up his ass about the whole affair, and decided to leak Kim Philby’s name to the New York Sunday News. Equally uninhibited, thanks to the custom of parliamentary privilege (which means no one can sue for libel over any remarks made in the Commons), was Labour MP Marcus Lipton. He stood up on 25 October 1955 and asked: ‘Has the Prime Minister made up his mind to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr. Harold Philby…?’32 As foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan was instructed to make a statement in response. In a briefing paper circulated to the cabinet he maintained that it would be very unwise to start too scrupulous an inquiry into the whole affair. ‘Nothing would be worse than a lot of muckraking and innuendo,’ he fretted. ‘It would be like one of the immense divorce cases which there used to be when I was young, going on for days and days, every detail reported in the press.’33
This was certainly the view of the man chosen to brief Macmillan ahead of the debate, MP Richard Brooman-White, whose career might be summarized as Eton, Cambridge, MI6, Conservative Party. He was an old friend of Philby, and, in the double agent’s own words, was one of those who was ‘absolutely convinced I had been accused unfairly. They simply could not imagine their friend could be a communist. They sincerely believed me and supported me.’34 The fact that everyone had thought exactly the same about Donald Maclean does not seem to have occurred to them.
‘No evidence has been found to show that Mr Philby was responsible for warning Burgess and Maclean,’ Macmillan assured the House. ‘While in Government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously. I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called “third man,” if, indeed, there was one.’35
Lipton and a few Labour colleagues protested. ‘Whoever is covering up whom and on what pretext, whether because of the membership of a circle or a club, or because of good fellowship or whatever it may be, they must think again and think quickly,’ said Frank Tomney, a trade unionist who had walked the whole way from Bolton to London in search of work in the thirties.36 He was howled down by the Tory benches, where a taunting chant of ‘Say it outside!’ was soon got up. Philby himself repeated the invitation to Lipton at a press conference the following day, and the MP had little choice but to withdraw the accusation, saying he ‘deeply regretted’ it.37 ‘The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was some time in 1934,’ Philby lied to the assembled journalists, all of whom were utterly charmed.38
Burgess and Maclean finally surfaced in Moscow the following February, when they were triumphantly presented to the world’s press to read a script about how they ‘came to the Soviet Union to work for the aim of better understanding with the West’.39 Philby’s luck did not run out for a further seven years. Following up a tip-off from yet another defector, an old friend of Philby’s from his MI6 days, Nicholas Elliott, was dispatched to Beirut, where Philby was working as a journalist and hit
ting the bottle in a big way – like Burgess and Maclean before him. Philby finally shared all in January 1963 with the words: ‘Okay, here’s the scoop.’40 After providing Elliott with a signed confession running to several pages, he contacted his KGB handler and was quietly smuggled on board a Soviet freighter. Two months later, the British government was forced to admit that he, too, had gone missing. And in June, beneath the provocative headline, ‘HELLO, MR PHILBY’, the state-owned Russian paper Izvestia revealed that he was not only a resident of Moscow, but a newly sworn citizen of the Soviet Union. He died in 1988 and was buried with a full KGB honour guard, just ahead of the collapse of the country and system he had devoted his life to.
In 1968 a trio of Sunday Times journalists published The Philby Conspiracy, which for many years stood as the definitive work on the scandal. By way of demonstrating how most people grew out of their youthful dalliances with communism and went on to lead the most respectable of lives, the book mentioned the names of a few other Cambridge friends: ‘men who are now diplomats, millionaires, bulwarks of the Church, the Establishment and the established’. One such was ‘Anthony Blunt, now Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures’.41 A decade after the book’s publication, Margaret Thatcher was forced to confirm in the Commons that Blunt had also spied for the Russians. He had even helped to organize Maclean’s defection to Moscow. Although the British security services had allowed him to keep his job at Buckingham Palace, they had known he was a Soviet agent since 1964 – a year after Philby had been unmasked, and a full thirteen years after Maclean had eluded his half-hearted pursuers.
If a mistake is worth making, it is worth making again and again.
‘I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge, and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt – there was not.’
Sir Anthony Eden, House of Commons, 20 December 1956
Anthony Eden needed an excuse. He knew full well that Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had seized power in Egypt in a coup in 1954, was bad news. When, two years later, he nationalized the Suez Canal – a vital trade route controlled by the UK since the Victorian era – it only went to prove exactly what sort of a man Nasser was. ‘We all know this is how fascist governments behave, and we all remember, only too well, what the cost can be in giving in to fascism,’ thundered the prime minister in a BBC broadcast on 8 August.42 Eden had made his name as a vocal opponent of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler back in the thirties; now, he was determined to refight the defining battle of his youth.
No matter that Nasser did not intend to stop shipping using the canal – he needed the income from it to fund his plan for a hydroelectric dam on the Nile – or that he offered to keep on all its staff on the salaries and terms they had previously enjoyed and pay all shareholders the full price of their shares as recorded on the Paris stock exchange the day before his nationalization. The canal, which linked the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, knocking more than four thousand miles off a journey that would otherwise take ships the full length of Africa and back again, was too important to trust to a man who, for all Eden’s talk of fascism, was leaning dangerously leftwards and making friendly overtures to both the Soviet Union and China. More than half of Europe’s oil came through the canal, giving Nasser an effective stranglehold on Britain’s energy supplies. More to the point, like so many former colonial subjects, he was challenging British power, and as such he needed to be swiftly and definitively crushed.
What Eden lacked was an actual justification for an aggressive response. ‘We should be on weak ground on basing our resistance on the narrow argument that Colonel Nasser had acted illegally,’ reads a cabinet briefing note drawn up by government lawyers. ‘From the legal point of view, his action amounted to no more than a decision to buy out the shareholders.’43 What they needed, concluded the special Egypt Committee that Eden convened of his most hawkish colleagues, was ‘some aggressive or provocative act by the Egyptians’.44 But as the months went past, and the British Army drilled its troops and painted its vehicles in desert colours, Nasser obstinately refused to provide one.
So they had to create one themselves. On 14 October two French diplomats visited Chequers. Eden told his private secretary that there would be ‘no need’ for any notes to be taken of their meeting and the visitors’ book was quietly doctored to excise their names. Six days later the foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, cancelled his official engagements, claiming to be ill. Instead of resting up at home he caught a flight from RAF Hendon to a military airfield in France. From there he was driven to a villa in the Paris suburb of Sèvres where the French prime minister, Guy Mollet, and the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, were waiting. France, which had overseen the canal’s construction in the nineteenth century, and which remained a major shareholder right up until Nasser’s action, was committed to military action alongside Britain; the top secret agreement, signed in the villa’s kitchen two days later with a champagne toast, brought Egypt’s neighbour fully on board. The existing peace between Israel and Egypt was already uneasy: Nasser had demanded ‘Israel’s death’ a year before.45 But, thanks to the terms of the Protocol of Sèvres, it would be Israel which struck first.
The agreement did not beat about the bush. And it came with a full timetable and detailed instructions:
1. The Israeli forces launch in the evening of 29 October 1956 a large scale attack on the Egyptian forces with the aim of reaching the Canal Zone the following day.
2. On being apprised of these events, the British and French Governments during the day of 30 October 1956 respectively and simultaneously make two appeals to the Egyptian Government and the Israeli Government on the following lines:
A. To the Egyptian Government
a) halt all acts of war.
b) withdraw all its troops ten miles from the Canal. c) accept temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by the Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the Canal by vessels of all nations until a final settlement.
B. To the Israeli Government
a) halt all acts of war.
b) withdraw all its troops ten miles to the east of the Canal.
…It is agreed that if one of the Governments refused, or did not give its consent, within twelve hours the Anglo-French forces would intervene with the means necessary to ensure that their demands are accepted.46
On 29 October, just as agreed, Israeli forces invaded Sinai, the peninsula between the Egyptian border and the Suez Canal. The next day, putting on their most surprised faces, the British and French governments demanded a ceasefire from both sides. When Nasser refused, British planes unleashed hell, practically destroying the Egyptian air force. On 5 November ground troops went in.
The invasion had one immediate effect – the exact effect Eden had been trying to avoid: Nasser did finally close the canal, scuttling all forty ships that were currently in it for good measure. The canal would not reopen to shipping until well into the following year. But the invasion had a second unwanted consequence: it whipped up an unprecedented frenzy of condemnation back home. The prime minister was booed in the Commons as he arrived to debate a Labour motion: ‘That this House deplores the action of Her Majesty’s Government in resorting to armed force against Egypt in clear violation of the United Nations Charter’.47 Eden was forced to fall back on his own record to defend himself. ‘I have been personally accused of living in the past and being too much obsessed with the events of the ’thirties,’ he told baying MPs. ‘However that may be, is there not one lesson of that period which cannot be ignored? It is that we best avoid great wars by taking even physical action to stop small ones.’48 This overlooked a fairly enormous point: that Eden had actually started the small war to justify an action he had been itching to take for months.
But as yet, no one knew this. All they knew was that almost everyone seemed to think it had been a bad idea. Eden’s protests that he had taken nothing more than a ‘p
olice action’ in intervening to ‘separate the belligerents’ cut little ice. There were protests against the war across the Middle East, and as far afield as China and Indonesia. The UN General Assembly convened its first emergency session, with sixty-four nations voting to demand an immediate ceasefire. Thirty thousand people crowded into Trafalgar Square to hear Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, spit fire at the prime minister: ‘If Sir Anthony is sincere in what he says – and he may be – then he is too stupid to be Prime Minister.’ The chant ‘Law not war!’ rang out around the square. A breakaway group marched down Whitehall singing, ‘One, two, three, four, we won’t fight in Eden’s war.’ They had to be held back by police at the entrance to Downing Street.49
It wasn’t the domestic protesters that did for Sir Anthony; it was the Americans. The US had been quite happy to intervene when Iran’s first democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddeq, had tried a similar trick in 1951 and seized control of Britishowned oil companies within his borders. The CIA had fomented a revolt which ended with Mosaddeq in prison and a much more ‘friendly’ regime in Tehran that didn’t bother with silly notions like voting. But this time, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the US, and he had been clear from the outset that he (and by extension, America) wanted nothing to do with military action in the region. ‘I hope that you will consent to reviewing the matter once more in its broadest aspects’ was Ike’s magnificently diplomatic message to Eden when he learned the Brits were determined ‘to drive Nasser out of Egypt’.50 In the White House, he was said to use somewhat more ‘barrack-room language’ to describe Eden’s decision. But the prime minister and his colleagues seemed to have their fingers in their ears. ‘We must keep the Americans really frightened…. Then they will help us to get what we want,’ wrote Chancellor Harold Macmillan in his diary after a particularly discouraging conversation with the US secretary of state early in the crisis.51