The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Read online

  ‘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 MI6 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 MI6 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 MI6, 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 fami
ly. 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 [MI5] 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 MI6] – well, they just wouldn’t listen to anything against him.’

  ‘So this cable came, saying they had the proof, and I cabled back to White [Sir Dick White, former Director General of MI5 now Chief of MI6] 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. D
on’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.’