Art of Betrayal (14 page)

Twelve days after White took over MI6, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and so began a farcical campaign which would lead to the shattering of the illusions of power. Prime Minister Eden took it personally. Beyond the threat to oil supplies and the concern that Nasser was taking arms from a Soviet Union challenging Britain in its old playground, the idea that some jumped-up Arab could thumb his nose at Great Britain was too much for him. Eden was all handsome, polished charm on the surface. But beneath that he was highly strung and physically and mentally under strain with gout and nerves plaguing him, feeding on delusions of British grandeur. At Downing Street on the night of the nationalisation he ranted and raged. A kind of fever took hold of him in the coming days as he became obsessed with destroying Nasser. And he was unusually explicit about what that meant. There were no euphemisms or talk of ridding him of turbulent priests. One of his ministers recalled Eden calling him up on an unsecure line and saying, ‘I want Nasser murdered, don't you understand?'
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This was the licence to kill.

George Kennedy Young was left in little doubt about what he was being asked to do, nor did he harbour any moral doubts about such a course of action. ‘It's not a Sunday-school picnic,' he later
commented. ‘Acts of government are not choices between good and bad. They are between two evils – the lesser of two evils. Someone is always going to get hurt by a decision of government … absolute morality, absolute ethics just does not exist in affairs of the state.'
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Before and after the war, Young drew up plans to kill Nasser, ranging from using dissident military officers to kitting out an electric razor with explosives, to using poison gas and sending out hit teams, all very redolent of the CIA's attempts to ‘take out' Castro a few years later, which were equally hapless. Others in the service were reluctant to engage in that kind of behaviour, concerned that they would create a martyr.
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(The only other serious request for assassination was for the service to kill President Sukarno of Indonesia, a request that was ignored owing to fears of what would come next.)
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Nasser learnt of the plans and the KGB provided him with increased security, including a caged bird to warn of poison gas.
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But the debate about assassination was a sideshow to the real action. Young would later reflect that the problem with the whole Suez plan, in which he had the lead role within the service, was that it was a last play at Empire, at pretending that Britain did not have to live in the shadow of the Americans. The conspirators concocted a secret plan in which the Israelis would first invade part of Egypt and then the British and French would intervene as ‘peacekeepers', leaving the Canal in their hands. ‘It was the last self-conscious fling of the old British Style. Its failure may even have been mainly due to this style having become over self-conscious: the play and not the reality was the thing,' Young later wrote. ‘As the old wartime basements in Whitehall were opened up for the task-force planners, they all flocked in … rather too puffy of face and corpulent of body to play wistful roles. They were nevertheless delighted to see each other again, swap old memories, and once more sport their DSOs, MCs and Croix de Guerre.'
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The decrepitude of the old-school British intelligence establishment was all too clear to the CIA's representative on the Joint Intelligence Committee staff. The new boy from out of town, Chester Cooper, arrived in London just before Suez. At his first meeting, he found everyone to be very tall and wearing identical black suits (Savile Row), identical blue striped ties (Eton) and identical spectacles (National Health). As well as the latest intelligence documents,
they also proceeded to hand round some Greek verse. At one point someone stuck his head through the door to announce the latest cricket score. There were groans. Cooper was then proudly shown a Latin translation of the Greek verse which had occupied someone's attention rather than the more formal documents at hand.
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In a situation more than a little reminiscent of another Middle Eastern war nearly half a century later, when British intelligence chiefs were asked what would happen after Nasser had been removed and who would run Egypt, ‘there was a collective shrug'. They displayed little understanding of the force of Arab nationalism.
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The experts failed over Suez to see what was going on in the Arab street and to understand the resentment the presence of foreign troops created.
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MI6's intelligence on Egypt had also been fatally compromised. An entire network run under journalistic cover was penetrated by the Egyptians and in August was broken up, with thirty agents arrested and two British officials expelled.
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This was a crippling blow whose impact would spur the desire for a new approach within the service. What the intelligence said did not matter much anyway, since the few warnings that were given were ignored.
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The whole plot had been undertaken by a tiny cabal, including parts of MI6, around the Prime Minister with even some members of the JIC out of the loop (one transferred his life savings into American investments in fear of Britain's economic future when he found out).
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The noises from the Soviet Union were sufficiently threatening for Daphne Park, by now stationed in Moscow, to be sent out of the Embassy with the Defence Attaché to look for any signs that the Soviets might respond with force.
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The disaster of Suez was blamed by Young, in true blustering style, on timidity in Whitehall and that old canard of failing to follow through on a good plan. ‘There is a total collapse of will here,' he says he told his contact in Israel's Mossad during the operation.
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The failure roused American fury (although the US may also have sensed an opportunity to quash British pretensions of power in the Middle East). The real fury came not just because of London, Paris and Tel Aviv planning their operation in secret and then executing it ineffectively but because of what was happening in Eastern Europe at exactly the same moment.

As the crisis reached its apogee, Cooper of the CIA was woken by
a phone call before dawn on Saturday 3 November. He drove to his Embassy in Grosvenor Square, on the way waving to the prostitutes with whom he was now familiar from these trips. There he took a call from CIA Deputy Director Robert Amory. ‘Tell your friends', an exasperated Amory shouted so loudly that Cooper thought he could have heard him across the Atlantic without a telephone, ‘to comply with the god-damn cease-fire or go ahead with the god-damn invasion. Either way, we'll back 'em up if they do it fast. What we can't stand is their goddamn hesitation waltz while Hungary is burning.'
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From his prison cell in Budapest, Paul Gorka, the youthful resistance agent from Béla Bajomi's rolled-up network, had sensed a change of mood through October 1956.
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One day came the sound of gunfire in the distance, the next that of heavy weapons and artillery followed by helicopters. The guards claimed it was ‘just an exercise'. Then a captured tank smashed through the prison main gate. The freedom fighters on board released the prisoners, who stepped out to find bloodstained sandbags, smashed tanks and corpses littering the streets and a fully fledged anti-Communist uprising under way. Surely, with the promised resistance at last showing its strength, the West would come to its aid?

The first Western journalist to make it into the city during those violently hopeful days was Anthony Cavendish. On his way back from a late-night party in Vienna a few years earlier, his motorbike had skidded into a cyclist. This had been one run-in too many with Andrew King, then head of the MI6 station. Cavendish had been pushed out of MI6 and joined the UPI press agency. As he arrived in Budapest the Soviets were still in retreat from the outskirts of the city. ‘On the back of one tank lay the corpse of a Soviet soldier, his eyes staring vacantly at the Hungarian capital … A Hungarian peasant spat at one tank as it passed him an arm's length away,' he wrote.
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In the city, people asked Cavendish what the British and Americans were doing and when their help would arrive. There had been no advance warning of the uprising – another failure for British and American intelligence gathering. The CIA had only one officer in Hungary, who spent almost all of his time keeping his cover up and was under orders not to take an active role.
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For a few, tense days Budapest was liberated. The Russians, for the first time, had been
rolled back. And it had been done not by the CIA or by MI6 but by the Hungarian people. Then in the early hours of Sunday 4 November, Paul Gorka and his fellow fighters heard the voice of Imre Nagy, the leader of the uprising, say on the radio that Soviet tanks were on their way. As refugees headed over the border, the CIA station chief in Vienna received a stream of agent reports indicating Soviet preparations to crush the uprising. He knew there would be no cowboys riding to the rescue as the Soviet juggernaut primed itself.
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In London, officials noted uneasily that they could not protest about Russians attacking Budapest when they had just attacked Egypt.
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Frank Wisner arrived in Vienna and watched as the final messages came over from the Hungarian partisans. ‘We are under heavy machine gun fire … Goodbye friends. God save our souls.'
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Wisner felt utter impotence as the full might of the Red Army descended on Budapest. He drank heavily that night. On Vienna's pavements people listened to the bleak news on outdoor speakers installed on lampposts.
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‘It was desperate youngsters who sprung up as fast as others were cut down: it was flaming bottles of gasoline against armour and big guns,' wrote Cavendish in his despatch as the guns opened up on the city.
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As he listened to the news of the Soviet tanks entering the city, James McCargar was in a Viennese hotel room. ‘My anger was vented on the British and French, whose adventure at Suez I wildly blamed for giving the Russians the pretext for the action in Hungary,' recalled McCargar. All the ‘political warfare' and propaganda had led the Hungarians to believe they would not stand alone. They were wrong. There were no plans. There was no help. The Soviets had shown they were willing to use overwhelming force to maintain control of their European satellites and that the attempts to prise them away – whether through covert action or through supporting resistance groups – were likely to lead to nothing.
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Roll-back was dead.

In London, George Kennedy Young was also angry at a betrayal by an ally. ‘Although for ten years the United States government had always hoped for, even where it had not tried to propagate, a spirit of active resistance to Communism behind the Iron Curtain, when the moment came it was not prepared to lift a finger,' he wrote a few years later, perhaps overlooking the fact that lifting a finger over Hungary might have meant Armageddon. He also railed against
America's lack of support over Suez. ‘When its own Allies acted in pursuance of what they believed to be their national interests, the United States government took the lead in preventing them.'
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Britain had continued to live and labour under the illusion that it was still a great power. Suez exposed the truth. After the initial flare of miserable anti-Americanism had subsided, some would look to a close relationship with Washington to exercise influence and power, wherever that took them; others looked to Europe. But no longer could it be done alone. The relationship with the US would never be quite the same again. It was clear who was in charge. Eden emerged broken, his eyes staring vacantly, his hands twitching and his face grey. In a piece of sublime irony, he set off for Jamaica to recuperate at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming's simple, shuttered, cliff-top home where the former Naval Intelligence man was writing the James Bond books, his own antidote to the reality of post-imperial decline. Eden and Fleming may not have been amused if they had known that the Egyptian intelligence service bought up copies of the Bond books for their training courses.
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The deaths in Budapest put paid to the idea that, with Stalin gone, the Soviet Union had fundamentally changed. It helped undermine much of the international appeal of Soviet Communism and there was disillusion from within as well, including for KGB officer Anatoly Golitsyn. The Hungarian uprising was, he claimed, the moment when he understood that the system could not be reformed.
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Philby in Beirut watched the events faraway in Hungary and closer by in Egypt with a detached air. At the time he was going through one of his phases of feeling rather lost. His betrayals had left him in a strange halfway place between his two lives. His trail of personal devastation continued to grow. His second wife Aileen, who was back in Britain, had been self-harming for some time as her marriage disintegrated and perhaps also as she suspected her husband's dark secret. In Beirut, he received a telegram informing him of her death, news which caused him no distress. By then he had moved on. Just six weeks before Suez, he had been in the crowded bar of the St George's Hotel when he met Eleanor Brewer, the wife of the
New York Times
correspondent. He began to escort her around the souks and cafés and she left her husband. Before long Philby went to tell her ex-husband that he planned to marry Eleanor. ‘That sounds like the best
possible solution,' Brewer said. ‘What do you make of the situation in Iraq?' he added, returning to the political issue of the day.
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By 1959, Philby and Eleanor were living in a fifth-floor apartment full of her sculptures and his trinkets collected on travels around the region. For most who betray, falling in love is a risk, a vulnerability. But, after Litzi, Philby always managed to separate out his lives and Eleanor saw only the smile, never suspecting what it masked.