Art of Betrayal (42 page)

A fellow spy would fortuitously provide Philby an escape raft from alcoholic self-destruction. Philby had not known George Blake when they both worked for MI6, but the two former officers briefly became friends. Blake had engineered a daring escape through a window in Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 with the help of sympathetic peace activists who then sheltered him and drove him to Berlin in a camper van. It meant he was able to meet Lonsdale/Molody on Red Square for that anniversary after all. In Moscow one day, a colleague of Blake's wife called Rufina was introduced to Philby. He quickly made his intentions clear. She thought he looked a ‘middle-aged man with a puffy face' but while the looks had gone, the charm had not, nor the determination. ‘You're a lucky bloke,' Blake remarked to him.
⁶²
Rufina found it hard to reconcile the gentle, sometimes helpless man she knew with the master spy. He told her he never enjoyed the deception. They married and she had placed him on an even keel by the time he met Lyubimov.

After that night at the restaurant, Lyubimov and Philby became close friends, meeting regularly and drinking late into the night in Philby's book-lined apartment. Lyubimov found Philby's ideas for revitalising the London Residency useful although not enormously original. His most valuable role came in running a training class for new recruits. The fresh young KGB men would arrive at a safe flat on Gorky Street to be told what to wear and how to start a conversation when in England. Philby would role-play being a civil servant and then ask them to approach him and talk to him as a potential recruit.

Only once was Philby allowed to enter the headquarters of the service he had sworn loyalty to so many years earlier. ‘I have held official passes to seven major intelligence headquarters,' he told an audience in 1977. ‘So I claim that this is the eighth major intelligence
organisation which I have succeeded in penetrating.'
⁶³
‘There was a terrible silence,' remembers Lyubimov and then a few angry whispers before Philby added that where before he had been surrounded by wolves, this time it was by comrades. There was relieved and enthusiastic applause.

He took the gathered officers through his recruitment, explaining what had made his first case officer so appealing and how important his controller's patience had been in waiting for him slowly to establish his credentials so that he could eventually join the Secret Service. He also gave them a piece of advice: never confess if confronted – an interesting remark given that he had provided half a confession to Elliott in Beirut. KGB officers found Philby very different from Blake. Blake clung to the belief that his work had not led to the death of any agents. Philby knew it had ‘and it didn't seem to bother him'. It was a war, a Cold one perhaps, but a war nevertheless.
⁶⁴

There was only one Englishman and one former member of MI6 who truly understood Philby. Some friendships could survive betrayal. When Graham Greene came out to visit, it had been thirty-five years since the two had last met. Both were nervous. Greene sat silent in the car as it approached Philby's Moscow apartment.
⁶⁵
When he walked in, they hugged each other and clapped each other on the back. The vodka came out and two greying old men talked about what they had done in the war. Greene had written an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir,
My Silent War
, which was remarkable in its defence of his old colleague. Greene wrote of how he had been dismayed by Philby's brutal manoeuvring against a colleague and how he had seen it as pure ambition. ‘I am glad now that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself and so my old liking for him comes back.' Greene offered a strange defence of Philby. It was like English Catholics who had helped Spain, he wrote, and who would have had to live through the Inquisition. What mattered to Greene was that Philby had acted out of belief and not self-interest. He even later defended his role in the deaths of the agents sent by boat to Albania. ‘They were going into their country armed to do damage to that country. They were killed instead of killing.'
⁶⁶
The introduction was a very public message – you are still my friend.

Greene had also sent Philby a draft of a novel he had waited many years to write.
The Human Factor
was the story of an MI6 officer who
betrays his service to the Soviets, but for love not ideology. The hero-of-sorts falls for the girl in Africa not Austria, but, as with Philby, the die had been cast from that moment. Philby said the one thing he disliked was the portrayal of the drab life in Moscow for the man after he is forced to flee Britain. Greene did not change anything.
⁶⁷
The same year the book came out, he had been asked what he would have done if he had known of Philby's treason in the 1940s. ‘I think perhaps, if in a drunken moment he had let slip a hint, I would have given him twenty-four hours to get clear and then reported it,' he replied.
⁶⁸
For Greene, there was always the fascination with intelligence as a game in which human motivations were played out.

The ‘turning' of a KGB man, for instance, would never surprise me, because the profession can become a sort of game as abstract as chess: the spy takes more interest in the mechanics of his calling than its ultimate goal – the defence of his country. The ‘game' (a serious game) achieves such a degree of sophistication that the player loses sight of his moral values. I can understand a man's temptation to turn double agent, for the game becomes more interesting.

When it came to Philby, Greene added that he still admired the way his friend had played the game and especially his constancy. ‘I myself would not be capable of such courage, of such a force of conviction.'
⁶⁹

That day in Moscow, the two men realised that a deep bond lay between them. Yet it was not faith but doubt. ‘He is burdened by doubt as well,' Philby told Rufina afterwards.
⁷⁰
Greene had cited one of his heroes Monsignor Quixote: ‘Sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith.' Greene was never a Communist, Philby never a Christian. But both men understood the other's faith and with it the awareness of a chasm of doubt which, if fallen into, would render their lives as lived meaningless. ‘For the first time, we were able to speak frankly with each other.' Philby had been used by the KGB in the first years after arriving, including not just writing his own book but also ghosting Gordon Lonsdale's, ‘but when they didn't use me, the doubt crept in,' he later said.
⁷¹
Greene was excoriated in the British press for his dinner (‘morally on a par with having a holiday with Dr Goebbels while this country was at war with Nazi Germany', said the
Daily Mail
) but he
went back three more times.
⁷²
For others the treachery remained too much. In the late 1980s, John le Carré was allowed into Russia and received a message at a party saying that a ‘great admirer' Kim Philby wanted to meet him. ‘It was a horrific suggestion,' le Carré later explained. ‘I couldn't possibly have shook his hand. It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive.'
⁷³

Was friendship Greene's only motivation? He kept in touch with MI6 long after leaving and did the occasional job for them.
⁷⁴
He passed on to the service the letters and postcards he received from Philby, once saying, ‘Well, if there was anything political in it, I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield, so it was either information or disinformation.'
⁷⁵
The friendship may have been real between the two men but it also might have been useful for the service to know what the old boy was thinking and also to keep a channel open in case he ever wanted to change sides again and get out. The Soviets certainly worried about the latter possibility. They sometimes wondered if he had fooled them all along, like he had fooled everyone else. Yet until his death in 1988 Philby always remained an Englishman in his manners but a Communist in his beliefs, willing to criticise both worlds but ultimately loyal to the latter. Even his former KGB controller was never quite sure about Philby. ‘In the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.'
⁷⁶
When Philby died, Lyubimov would mourn the departure of a friend. But he would also be living with his own experience of the bitterness of betrayal as another of his friends had become the man who gave MI6 their opportunity to avenge the past.

7

ESCAPE FROM MOSCOW

I
t was June 1985. As he opened the door of his Moscow apartment, Mikhail Lyubimov did not need to draw on his largely redundant spy skills to realise that something was wrong. Tension was etched on to the face of the old friend who stood on his doorstep. There were too many beads of sweat even for the stifling city heat of a Moscow summer.
¹
Lyubimov was an outsider now. A second divorce and an independent streak was enough to draw the ire of the hardliners in the KGB who had forced his departure a few years earlier. He had embarked on a new career as a writer.
²
But his visitor was still an insider and he was not supposed to be in Moscow. He was supposed to be in London.

The lean KGB officer stepped into the kitchen and turned on the tap. ‘What are you doing?' Lyubimov asked, thinking that he was trying to drown out any conversation if anyone was listening in. He just needed a drink, the man explained. He was in a bad way. His throat was dry. The vodka came out.

Memories had begun to pierce the fog that enveloped Oleg Gordievsky's mind and that shrouded events of a few days earlier. The journey to a small guesthouse on the outskirts of Moscow and the offer of some Armenian brandy was clear. But after that there were only brief, malevolent flashes like a dark forest lit up by lightning strikes. There were the faces of the men staring at him and the words ‘confess' repeated again and again. He had been drugged, he knew. But what had he said? He remembered a kind of euphoria that had come over him after the brandy which left him laughing and arguing and talking expansively with no nervousness or fear. He knew he had been close to breaking. He knew they were on to him.

As the memories slowly fought their way to the surface, Gordievsky had begun to recall more of what had been said.

‘Why do you have all those anti-Soviet volumes – Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Maximov and the rest?' the voice asked him.

‘But of course,' he heard himself say, ‘as a PR [Political Reporting] Line officer I was supposed to read books like that.'

‘You used your diplomatic status to import things you knew were illegal in this country.'
³

There were other accusations that had also seeped into his consciousness before he arrived at Lyubimov's apartment which he did not now mention to his friend.

‘We know very well that you have been deceiving us for years,' they had said. ‘We know you were a British agent. You'd better confess.' Confess, the man said again and again. You've already done it, just do it again, they said, talking slowly as if to a child.

‘No, I've nothing to confess,' Gordievsky could recall replying. He did not mention these exchanges, only the books, to his friend. Gordievsky and Lyubimov had bought the banned books together years earlier when their friendship had been forged serving overseas, happier times when both men were rising through the ranks of the KGB. Those were days when Gordievsky had knocked on Lyubimov's door and walked in with a batch of telegrams from Moscow Centre and the latest gossip, not with a bottle of vodka and talk of interrogation. Lyubimov, unaware of how serious events were, tried to reassure his friend that even if he was fired it was not the end of the world. ‘I had to leave the KGB,' he explained. ‘Find something interesting to do. It may be a blessing.' Once Gordievsky had left, Lyubimov hurried to find his copies of Solzhenitsyn, wrapped them in plastic and buried them in the garden. Just in case.
⁴

The KGB was family to Gordievsky, but not everyone loves or is loyal to their kin. His father and brother had both served in its ranks. But within his home lay the seeds of mistrust which would lead to betrayal. His father was a committed Communist who never spoke to his son of his work. But the young Gordievsky could sometimes glimpse the fear that lay hidden beneath the loyalty. In the late 1930s his father had watched friends and colleagues in the NKVD, the KGB's forerunner, being arrested as part of the great purges that engulfed the Soviet state. Some had been executed, others exiled to Siberia. The father would repeat the mantra ‘The NKVD is always
right,' but the son would remember the dread that lay beneath the profession of faith. Sometimes the young Oleg would overhear his parents arguing in their bedroom about politics, the only place they could talk freely.
⁵
His mother was not a true believer in the cause; she was more willing to question and criticise. She could see the intrigues and the brutality that her husband, perhaps for self-protection, chose not to speak of. For Oleg the combination of fascination and fear of the secret state came young.

The interwoven strands of loyalty and mistrust coexisted in the young man as he grew up and went to college, planning on a career in the Foreign Ministry. On the surface he was a normal
Homo Sovieticus
, able to live under the doublethink that George Orwell described in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, toeing the party line in public, thinking more freely in private. Parents would warn children what to joke about, especially outside the home. When he studied languages at college, Gordievsky noticed that many other students chose not to read Western newspapers even when they were finally allowed to for fear of being seen as overly interested in ‘subversive' views. Gordievsky was curious enough to read them and began to open his mind.