The Spy Who Went Into the Cold (2013) - full transcript
Documentary on Kim Philby's career as an MI6 agent who spied for the Soviet Union throughout WWII and afterward, and his subsequent exile in the Moscow.
(record scratching)
("The Platters" by The Great Pretender)
♫ Oh yes, I'm the great pretender ♫
He was just dad.
In a way, he's always been just my father.
[Voiceover] "Dad" was
Harold Adrian Russel Philby,
better known to the world as Kim,
an Englishman who spied
for the Soviet Union.
I remember him as clear as day
just with his sort of
stuttering and wah wah wah,
you know sort of real English,
you know sort of Oxford,
Cambridge type, you know?
He had everything really going for him.
It was a shame that he did what he did,
but there it was.
♫ I play the game
♫ But to my real shame ♫
The last time I spoke to that Communist,
knowing him to be a Communist
was sometime in 1934.
[Voiceover] It was a lie.
On a stormy night in Beirut,
a double life that had
lasted 30 years ended
when he defected to Russia.
He was one of the worst
traitors in history.
[Voiceover] For the rest of his life,
he lived among a people
whose language he never mastered
while his countrymen counted the cost
of trusting him with their secrets.
It infected the whole British
intelligence establishment
with a paranoia.
I mean, if Philby, good
old Philby, good old Kim
could have been a spy,
any of us could have been.
[Voiceover] Scores of
books have been written about
what Philby did, but the
man inside remains elusive.
He was just like two different
people really in one body.
It was strange.
♫ Oh yes, I'm the great pretender ♫
[Voiceover] For the investigative
writer Phillip Knightley
Philby's defection was the
start of a long pursuit.
These are the Philby letters, are they?
These are the Philby letters.
[Voiceover] How many were there roughly?
How many years did you
say you talked to him?
20 years, yes.
Your letter from India
took six weeks to reach me,
so the chance of a casual drink
presented itself too late.
However, if you're still interested,
I think there's a fair
possibility of us getting together
for a real talk in the
not too distant future.
That's how it all started.
[Voiceover] Knightley
took up Philby's invitation
to meet him.
A room had been reserved
for him by the KGB.
(phone rings)
Then the phone rang, and
a voice said, "Knightley?"
And I said yes.
He said, "Philby here."
I could hardly believe it.
He said, "Do you want to
start work straight away,
and come around for a drink
or we'll meet tomorrow?"
And I said, "Straight away,
Mr. Philby, straight away."
He said, "A neighbor of
mine will pick you up."
Well the neighbor turned
out to be his KGB minder,
his KGB gopher, and he drove me
to a small block of
flats in a nice garden,
and we went up the lift to Philby's door.
And the door opened, and there was Philby.
A smaller, less impressive
figure than I'd thought
because slightly stooped, carpet slippers,
looking very much at home.
An Englishman receiving a visitor
in his drawing room.
(opera singing)
[Voiceover] Philby's
journey to that flat in Moscow
had started here in Cambridge.
The contrast between the
gilded lives around him
and the harsh world outside
drove him towards left-wing politics.
The great fear then was the
rise fascists all over Europe.
The question was what
could people like him
do about it?
He was very lucky in that
his father, St. John Philby,
gave him 50 pounds, which in those days,
was quite a lot of money,
and he immediately with that money,
bought himself a motorcycle,
and took a train all the way to Vienna.
[Voiceover] He got there
just in time to witness
the brutal suppression of local Socialists
by the Austrian fascists.
(cannons firing)
The Nazis had just
re-introduced beheading
of political offences,
and they carted one political dissident
to the gallows on a chair
because he'd already been wounded.
These sort of things for a young man
has a very powerful impression.
[Voiceover] And so did this woman,
Alice, or Litzi, Friedman.
She was a young, worldly-wise divorcee
who was fighting fascism on the ground.
Philby fell in love almost
as soon as he met her.
He gave her his volume of Shelley's poems,
and in return got a
lesson in the realities
of an unprivileged life.
She really took him in hand.
She was two years older than he was,
and they went eventually and
lived in a very small flat
practically no money, but they worked hard
to protect the working class
against this right wing coup.
[Voiceover] After Philby defected,
Patrick Seale wrote a book about him.
Evidence of his early political views
wasn't hard to find.
Oh God.
This is the fruit of the
research into that book,
and it's a mass of stuff in there.
It is many years since
I've looked in here.
A colossal amount of stuff here.
[Voiceover] One source was a journalist
called Eric Gedye who met
the young Philby frequently
during those hectic weeks.
Kim came to see him, and was desperate,
I think, for suits to take
to the poor and socialists
who were running for their lives.
Gedye was alarmed by
what was happening there,
and the fact that the working class
had been absolutely sort of savagely
contained and crushed by the fascists.
[Voiceover] After a short
and passionate affair,
Kim married Litzi.
[Patrick] Harold Adrian Russell Philby
married to Alice, Litzi,
Friedman, Mosaich, Jew.
[Voiceover] To escape the Nazis,
the newlyweds came to London.
Here in Regents Park,
Philby had the meeting
that would change his life.
A friend of Litzi's, another
Austrian Jew called Edith,
had brought him to here to meet
a resident Soviet agent code named Otto.
Otto's advice was not what he expected.
"Don't join the Communist Party," he said,
"Create a cover story for yourself,
and get inside Britain's
ruling establishment."
They advised him very
strongly to give up Communism,
go give up left-wing views,
and pretend to be a rightist,
which he did of course.
He even went and made friends
with the German embassy
and broke completely with
all his left-wing friends.
[Voiceover] His great love
became the collateral cost
of his new mission.
He didn't actually divorce
her until after the war.
By then, he had three children
by a respectable English woman
called Aileen Furze and
was safely installed
at the heart of British intelligence.
Nobody seemed interested in the fact
that he was once married to a Communist,
had a background and belief in Communism,
been active in left-wing
politics in university.
It was just glossed over.
There was something about Philby
which inspired confidence.
He seemed like an archetypal
honest Englishman.
[Voiceover] Four
other Cambridge students
with impeccable backgrounds started spying
for the Soviets at the same time.
Two of them, Guy Burgess
and Donald Maclean,
were good friends of Philby's.
Guided by the KGB, they
all worked their way
into government jobs, passing
so many wartime secrets
to Moscow that the Russians
could scarcely believe
they were genuine.
But the end of the war plunged them
into a dangerous new world.
(upbeat jazz music)
In 1949, Philby had been
sent by MI6 to Washington.
His job was the top
secret point of liaison
between British and American intelligence.
It was a big step up.
People even spoke of him
becoming the next head of MI6.
The only cloud on his sunny horizon
was his friend Guy Burgess,
whom he'd rather incautiously
invited to stay.
Burgess, homosexual and louche,
scandalized the locals.
And there was worse to come.
[Voiceover] This is
the BBC Home Service,
and here is the news.
The Foreign Secretary made
his expected statement
in Parliament today
about the disappearance
of the two Foreign Office officials,
Mr. Maclean and Mr. Burgess.
[Voiceover] No longer was
uncle Joe an ally of the west.
To spy for the Communists
was the worst of sins.
In the anonymous buildings hear Parliament
where MI6 was housed,
there was consternation.
Unknown to the public, Maclean
was about to be interrogated
because of evidence supplied by the FBI.
Someone had obviously tipped him off.
The finger of suspicion pointed
at their bright young star in Washington.
Philby was recalled
immediately upon the defection.
He traveled back to London.
As soon ad he arrived, he was
taking to MI5's headquarters.
[Voiceover] Waiting for him
was a team of interrogators
led by Dick White, the rising talent
of the counterespionage service.
The trump card for MI5 was to produce
Litzi Friedman's passport,
showed it to him,
and it was covered with stamps
of her travels on the continent,
and he was asked, "If you were
living on two pounds a week,
how could she afford to
travel around the continent
in this way?"
And Philby was absolutely
poleaxed by that,
and he had no reply.
[Voiceover] But it
wasn't a knockout blow.
They tried to get a confession from him,
by having him interrogated
by Buster Milmo QC,
and Philby proved more
than a match for Milmo,
adopting a technique that he later told me
he'd adopted frequently in these matters.
When asked to explain something
that looked really suspicious,
he would just say, "That's interesting,
I can't explain that, it's very very,"
and go no further.
[Voiceover] MI5 thought he was guilty,
and Philby had to resign from his job,
but some colleagues in
MI6 weren't so sure.
It sort of split six.
He had his friends who felt
he's been badly done by,
and he had those who
were absolutely convinced
that he was guilty, and being British,
it was not resolved.
It was swept under the carpet.
[Voiceover] Philby
found himself in limbo,
no job with MI6 and no contact
with his friends in the KGB.
He brought his wife and now five children
down to the sleepy Sussex
town of Crowborough
and tried without much
success to get work.
Dad was all over the place.
He worked in Majorca.
He worked in Ireland.
We never knew really what he was doing.
I sort of slightly assumed you
don't question it as children
that he might've been some sort of rep.
I think people helped him, you know,
gave him the odd job or two
because he really wasn't employable.
[Voiceover] They rented
a large Victorian house,
shielded from the road by trees.
But the unresolved
question didn't go away.
Suddenly, Dad was in the
news, he was on the paper,
this is the Third Man.
[Voiceover] The man behind this headline
was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI.
He was so furious that
Philby had got off scot free
that he deliberately leaked
information to a journalist.
But the plot backfired.
Foreign Secretary Harold
Macmillan was asked
a question about it in Parliament.
And with no proof that
would stand up in court,
he had no option but to clear Philby.
This is what he said.
[Voiceover] There was
no conclude that he had,
at any time, betrayed
the interests of Britain,
or to identify him with
the so-called third man,
if there was one.
[Voiceover] Philby immediately
invited the world's press
to join him at his mother's
flat in Kensington.
[Voiceover] Mr. Harold
Philby on the right
holds a press conference to deny charges
that he was involved in the disappearance
of Burgess and Maclean.
Mr. Philby, Mr. Macmillan,
the Foreign Secretary
said there was no evidence
that you are the so-called
"Third Man who allegedly
tipped off Burgess and Maclean."
Are you satisfied with that clearance
that he gave you?
Yes, I am.
[Reporter] If there was a third man,
were you in fact the third man?
No, I was not.
I think Mum was always worried.
She said to her best friend once,
"I'm terrified Kim's going
to go to Moscow or Russia
and take John and Jo."
I was asked to resign
from the Foreign Office
because of an imprudent
association with Burgess
and as a result of his disappearance.
Beyond that, I'm afraid I have
no further comment to make.
[Voiceover] So do you
mean she knew he was a spy?
I really don't know.
I think she probably suspected.
He'd been accused!
I mean, you know, Burgess
had been living with us.
It must be very difficult not to know
although he was very very good.
He obviously was excellent
because he got away with
all the questioning by all
the sort of authorities
and came out of it.
The last time I spoke to a Communist,
knowing him to be a Communist,
was sometime in 1934.
[Voiceover] Just what
a whopper that was,
very few people knew that at that stage.
The whisper put around was that Philby
had been a middle rank civil
servant of no great importance.
Then Knightley came across a book
by a former secret agent
writing under the name
of John Whitwell.
Oh here we are.
[Voiceover] So you discovered this book?
Yeah.
There we are, "British Agent."
And of course, we quickly
found out from publishers
that John Whitwell was a pseudonym,
both a secret service pseudonym,
and an author's one as well,
and his real name was Leslie Nicholson.
His publisher eventually agreed to give us
his private address,
which was above a cafe
in the East End of London.
I went down to see him.
Very pathetic case.
Like so many people who had
been in the secret services,
he was in bitter dispute
over his pension rights,
and he felt he had been
diddled over his pension.
He was living in very
straightened circumstances,
and then I realized of course,
that all I had to do was sell him
what his life used to be like
when he was on expenses.
Towards the end of this
very boozy four hour lunch,
he said, "Phillip, I'm a bit surprised
at how little you know about Philby.
Don't you know what Philby's job was
in the secret service?"
And I said, "Well we
haven't got that far yet."
He said, "He was in charge
of the anti-Soviet section."
The anti-Soviet section of
the British Intelligence
was in the hands of a Soviet agent.
[Voiceover] But instead of jail,
Lucky Kim found himself
in what was then called
the Paris of the Middle East.
This strange twist in
his fortunes happened
because some people in MI6
couldn't bring themselves
to believe that he had betrayed him.
They went along to David
Astor of The Observer,
and the editor of The Economist,
and they said, "This man
has been grossly wronged
by the establishment, and
he should be looked after."
And they found him work.
So his period of treachery
was extended by years.
[Voiceover] So they found him work
not only as a journalist, but as a spy?
Yes.
[Voiceover] Astonishing
really, isn't it?
Yes, it was astonishing,
but then it's an astonishing world.
[Voiceover] Dick Beeston was then
Middle East correspondent
for News Chronicle.
Dick ans his wife Moira befriended Philby
when he arrived.
They noticed he drank too much,
but his charm was undeniable.
He had this stammer which people found
rather attractive in a
way, sort of tried him out
with his words, but it was
actually his good manners
and his charm which went down very well
during the time that he was sober.
[Voiceover] In those days,
the British embassy in Beirut
was housed in something
called the Spears Building.
Even today, the electricity
bills come in their name.
MI6, or "The Friends,"
as they were called,
operated from here up on the fourth floor.
The whole building is being
redeveloped as flats now,
but after the 1956 Suez Crisis,
it became the hub of a
vast intelligence web
covering the whole region.
It was very much a center.
There were a lot of sort of CIA people
buzzing round the place, and quite a lot
of British Intelligence people,
mostly based on the embassy there.
[Voiceover] Did you know who was who?
Yes, more or less we did, yes.
There was a man called Paul Paulson
who was the head of
MI6 operation in Beirut
who actually had been at school
with Kim Philby at Westminster.
[Voiceover] One of the embassy insiders
was John Julius Norwich.
Diplomacy, like spying,
was still very much
a gentleman's game.
This is the main embassy team
after the new ambassador
Moore Crossthwaite
had presented his credentials.
[Voiceover] Which one was he?
He's the one in the middle here.
Myself, Max Perotti our
consul, Alec Brodie,
our military attache, Paul Paulson,
he was the head of MI6 in the embassy,
and John Selwyn, who I
see is also in uniform,
an enormous display of medals.
I cannot exactly remember what he did.
[Voiceover] In the summer heat,
embassy staff were allowed to flee
to the hills every afternoon.
The custom in those days
was to drink before you drove.
Next to the British embassy,
there was a very pleasant
little establishment
called Joe's Bar, and several of us
used to congregate in
Joe's Bar at one o'clock
in order to have a couple of stiff ones
to help us drive up the
mountains for lunch.
There was Paul Paulson,
John Julius Norwich,
and Colonel Brody, the military attache.
It was a quite amusing
little group of people.
[Voiceover] So more of a
sort of spooks' bar, was it?
Yeah.
[Voiceover] In 1975, the
streets around the embassy
were overwhelmed by civil war.
In the shadow of those scarred buildings,
I found someone who remembered
where the bar had once been.
[Voiceover] And what was Joe's Bar like?
Was it a nice bar?
[Voiceover] It became one of Philby's
favorite drinking dens.
Over there, that yellow
building behind the trees
is the British Embassy.
They'd just step down here to the bar.
[John] You went in, there
was the bar on your right.
There was a window not more
than 12, 15 feet across.
It had two or three little tables
at one of which was Kim
who was part of the furniture.
I mean I was never there
when he wasn't there.
[Voiceover] And in what state was he?
Speechless.
I mean, perhaps he could
speak, but he didn't speak.
You said, "Hello Kim,"
and he said, "Hello."
And then you went and ordered your drink,
and everybody started talking,
and Kim just went on sitting
there at the back table.
He didn't even join us.
He didn't get up and join the party.
He just sat at the back.
On the other hand, I think he
listened very very carefully
to everything we were saying
because of the great mysteries of Kim
was that he never went
to a press conference
or anything like that.
You know, if some VIP
arrived, Kim was not there,
but every Sunday in the Observer,
frequently on the front page,
this brilliantly written account
from H.A.R. Philby, Beirut,
and we always wondered where he did it,
and how got the information
because he never seemed
to move from the bar.
[Voiceover] In fact, Philby's main base
was the Normandy Hotel, and it was here,
late in 1958, that a KGB agent
finally made contact again.
Philby said later that he felt his heart
pounding with excitement as he realized
he was back in the spying business.
But behind his cover story,
there were glimpses of turmoil inside.
At the end of a long evening,
my wife was sitting next to
him in Joe's Bar actually,
and she said, "Oh, were
you the third man?"
And he said, "My dear, if
you had a great friend",
and you knew that you had
some information about him
that would get him into enormous trouble,
what would you do?
"I always valued friendship
more than isms."
It was a sort of confession in a way,
but in fact in a way,
it wasn't a confession
because he was really more
interested in isms than loyalty.
[Voiceover] In 1960,
the British Embassy moved
into a new building on the Corniche.
Well this would be the view
that the British ambassador would have had
in those days.
Beautiful.
Patrick Seale has just
joined the press corps
as Philby's backup on the Observer.
I think, with retrospect, I can say
that he was trying to ingratiate himself
with the British authorities,
and persuade people,
particularly in the intelligence services,
that he had been falsely accused,
that he was totally loyal,
that I think was his ambition.
I think there was a certain resentment
that he'd been parachuted in,
they felt, to the corps, you know
rather than having earned
his stripes on the way up
because he had been
parachuted in, by the Friends.
[Voiceover] Alan Munro, standing here
behind the ambassador,
was then press attache
at the embassy.
Oddly enough, some years later,
I found the card which
Kim Philby had given me.
HAR Philby, The Observer, The Economist,
Hotel Normandy Beirut,
and on the back there,
he's written this map,
Rue Kantari, and so on,
and how to find his block of flats.
[Voiceover] Well this
is Rue Kantari today,
and up there on the fifth floor
is the flat where Philby lived.
It was the end of the Christian quarter,
over looking the port,
a quite sensational view
of Beirut there.
It was very comfortable, attractive,
and a good place for parties really.
[Voiceover] Parties.
Philby was famously
charming when they started,
often drunk by the time they ended.
And we all said, what
Kim really needs to do
is to find a really nice girl
who will keep him on
the straight and narrow.
And who he found was Eleanor,
who had been the wife of Saw Brewery
of the New York Times,
who was the only woman in Beirut
who drank much more than Kim did.
They loved going down to
the beach, often with a bag
full of little tiny bottles
of different sorts of drink,
which they would consume
and struggle to come up
from the beach, often falling
down, bruising themselves.
[Voiceover] It was hard to
remember that back in England
he still had a wife and five children.
One afternoon, Dick and Moira
Beeston met him out shopping.
"I've had great news, dear," he said.
"Come and we must celebrate.
Come and have a drink at the Normandy."
And he produced this cable
saying his wife had died.
We were very shocked about that,
but he said it was the
best thing for everybody.
He said, "You know,
she's been terribly ill
and hurting herself, and you know,
it was the best way out for everyone."
[Voiceover] Her ungrieving husband
returned to normal business
and soon married Eleanor.
For a few months or so, they seemed
very much in love and
not drinking very much,
and rather charming, and then
gradually it deteriorated,
and they both used to drink enormously.
Yes I think that is certainly true.
Definitely, yes.
Yes, indeed, yes.
They were well suited on
that line, yes, certainly.
[Voiceover] Lorraine Copeland
was Eleanor's best friend in Beirut.
She was married to a man
called Miles Copeland
who did freelance work for the CIA.
This brings it all back.
It was a round of parties.
We lived at La Vie Diplomatique,
and we lived a very pleasant life.
[Voiceover] Her son, also called Miles,
was then at school in Beirut.
The Philbys were often
guests at his parents' house.
The Philbys were always there,
and he was always drunk
and always stuttering,
and I remember saying once to my father,
"Why are we always with the Philbys?"
And he said, "Shut up."
He then told me later on
why I should've shut up
is because he was told by the CIA,
look we don't trust this guy.
Since you're in Beirut,
keep an eye on him,
and it turns out, the
best way to keep an eye
on Kim Philby was to invite
him to all the parties.
[Voiceover] At this point,
a man called Nicholas Elliott took over
as MI6 chief in Beirut.
Years later, he would make, for a spy,
a rare appearance on television
to talk about his work.
I got involved int his
sort of work before the war,
and I think one of the attractions,
from my point of view,
was firstly of course one
felt it was worthwhile,
and secondly, as such, it was
a very pleasant atmosphere
in which to work, and an
enormously high proportion
of one's colleagues, male and female,
were personal friends.
[Voiceover] Not least, Kim Philby,
whose charmed Mediterranean life
Elliot had done much to engineer,
and once in Beirut, he
continued to favor him.
I remember the head of the
MI6 station coming to see me
to say, "I just want to tell you about"
one of the correspondents
here, a very senior one.
His name is Kim Philby,
and he reports for the
Observer and for the Economist,
and I just want to let you
know he used to be one of us,
"and you can trust him with information."
And so I did.
[Voiceover] And who was that?
Who was the head of station?
The head of the station
was Nicholas Elliott.
[Voiceover] Elliott had
been to Eton and Cambridge,
but he wore his expensive
education lightly.
I went one day to his flat for lunch,
vast flat very much like
an ambassadorial set up,
but he was not a man who
people took very seriously,
perhaps mistakenly so.
He was very fond of telling
rather risque jokes,
and at lunch he was full of these stories,
and he gave the impression of a man
who simply liked to enjoy himself.
[Voiceover] For two
years, Philby was in clover.
But just as Elliott's
tour of duty in Beirut
was coming to an end, a
conversation took place
130 miles south in
Israel, which would turn
Philby's life upside down.
Philby became the focus of attention
in a relatively casual conversation
between Victor Rothschild,
who had been an MI5 officer
during the Second World War,
and a woman called Flora Solomon
at a drinks party in Tel Aviv.
[Voiceover] This is
the marriage certificate
of Kim Philby to his recently
deceased wife, Aileen.
Who was the witness?
Flora Solomon.
Flora Solomon complained
about some articles
which had been written by
Kim Philby in the Observer.
She felt they were anti-Zionist,
and she remarked to Victor Rothschild
that this was was pretty
rich coming from Kim Philby
on the basis that Philby
had in fact approached her
at the beginning of the war
and had pitched her to join the Comintern,
to quote, "work for peace."
[Voiceover] Chapman
Pincher, Harry to his friends,
is approaching 100, and a legend
among spy hunting journalists.
He knew Victor Rothschild well,
and says Flora actually went even further.
She said, "Look, there's
something I must tell you."
I know that Philby was a spy,
and I've known a long time,
and it's been on my conscience,
but I'd like you to know
"that I know he was working
for the KGB" is what she said.
[Voiceover] The popular myth
about the elite secret services
was that great decisions were
taken over game of billiards
in the clubs of London.
All of the main player in
the drama that followed
came from this world.
Victor Rothschild left
the security service,
but he was still in very close contact
with several senior MI5
officers including Dick White,
and he reported to Dick
White that this conversation
had taken place.
[Voiceover] By then,
White, Philby's MI5 adversary
in 1951, had been transferred
to the top job at MI6.
Sir Dick and Hollis,
who was then head of MI5,
got their hands together and decided
they'd have to do something.
But they would do, and this
thing I think is terrible
because it happened so often,
they decided under no circumstances
would he be prosecuted in any way,
whatever he might admit, but
in return for a confession,
they would give him total immunity,
not only from prosecution
but from publicity.
In other words, the whole thing
would be completely hushed up.
[Voiceover] But there were tensions
between the two branches
of British intelligence.
SIS, as MI6 is officially called,
is now over there across the Thames.
The normal procedure was for them
to hand a matter like this
over to MI5, the spy catching service
just down the road.
Accordingly, MI5 were preparing
one of their top interrogators
for the confrontation.
Arthur Martin was
briefed and ready to go,
and at that 11th hour, Dick White decided
that it should be an SIS officer
who should make the
approach to Kim Philby,
not Arthur Martin.
[Voiceover] What had happened, it seems,
is that Nicholas Elliott
had returned from Beirut
and got wind of what was going on.
He put the case to his boss
that he should be the person
sent to confront Philby.
Surprisingly, White agreed.
His justification for this was
that Arthur Martin would
not really cut the mustard.
At the end of the Second World War,
he had been an NCO.
He had never risen above
the rank of sergeant,
and in a very class conscious world,
Dick White, who had ended up
with the rank of brigadier,
felt very strongly that Arthur
would not impress Kim Philby.
So they told Elliott, and
Elliott confirmed this to me
that he had to say to
Philby that they knew
he had ceased to spy in 1949,
and the reason for that was
that that wast just before
Philby had gone to America,
so if they could get a statement from him
saying he had ceased to spy in 1949,
the Americans could be assured
that he had not give away
any of their secrets
because he had ceased to be a spy
before he went to Washington.
[Voiceover] So Elliott
arrived back in Beirut
to confront Philby.
But when?
The usual story is that he
came back in January '63,
but according to Eleanor Philby,
in her book about these events,
Elliott actually came back in December,
just before Christmas.
He checked into a discreet hotel
where he wouldn't be recognized
and took Kim and herself
out to an expensive meal.
There was the usual fund of
doubtful jokes from Elliott,
she says, but the gaiety was false.
And whatever was said
privately between them
made Kim so depressed
that he wouldn't go out
over Christmas and led
to him drinking so much
that he cracked his head
open on the radiator
in their bathroom on New Year's Day.
What I saw was a man who I thought
was simply a drunk.
He'd fallen down.
He was wounded, he had a
wound somewhere on his head,
I think, he was weeping
quite substantially.
I had never seen a grown
man weep as much as he.
He was clearly frightened.
I thought it was just drunkenness.
It was only later that I understood
that he was under tremendous pressure
and was worried that the Russians
would not save him in time.
[Voiceover] So if the
official story is right,
and the actual confrontation with Elliott
was in Mid-January, did
Elliott make an extra trip
to warn his friend?
Or did Eleanor get it wrong?
Or did someone else deliver the news
which ruined the Philbys' Christmas?
Here's one possible answer.
In December of 1962,
I went to a reception
given by my ambassador,
Moore Crossthwaite, and
one of the guests there,
indeed I think the principle guest,
was Sir Antony Blunt, who
had apparently come out
to Beirut on a rather unlikely
quest for a frog orchid.
[Voiceover] Blunt was then
Keeper of the Queen's Pictures.
Within 18 months, he
would secretly confess
to being one of the Cambridge spies,
recruited at the same time as Kim Philby.
But in December 1962, he
was still a close friend
of Victor Rothschild, whom he'd known
since their Cambridge
days, and both of them
were friends of Dick White.
The reception was, I
think, given in his honor.
He seemed perfectly relaxed
and was obviously off to do
a bit of hiking in the hills.
Just what had brought him out at the time,
in reality, I couldn't say.
[Voiceover] Could it really
have been that frog orchid?
I went to see Andre Schuiteman,
a world orchid specialist.
Here we have the orchid library.
There are so many orchids
they have their own library in Kew,
with thousands of books and journals.
We have here the book "Orchids
of Britain and Ireland,"
and here we have the frog orchid.
It's relatively common throughout Britain,
so you can see all the green.
[Voiceover] And you as an expert
would say that the frog
orchids simply don't grow in?
No, they don't grow in Lebanon.
There's a book about orchids of Lebanon.
There's an index, so it's not in Lebanon.
It's not in Lebanon.
[Voiceover] So you're
confident that if Antony Blunt
went to Lebanon, it would not have been
to see a frog orchid?
Definitely not.
It was clearly a lie, can't be true.
[Voiceover] This is the
ambassador's residence
where Blunt was staying
as a private guest.
Philby's flat was a short walk away.
There's no independent
evidence that they met but.
It seems inconceivable to me
that Blunt would have traveled to Beirut
at the time without having seen Philby,
knowing that they were old friends
and with many friends in common.
[Voiceover] Had Blunt picked up a clue
in something those friends had said
and come to warn his fellow spy?
(foghorn blares)
In early January, Philby
got a call from the embassy.
They said they wanted him
to come to a private flat
to meet the new local head of MI6,
skiing fanatic Peter Lunn.
When he arrived there, who should it be?
[Voiceover] Not Peter Lunn.
But Nicholas Elliott.
According to Nicholas, his words were,
"I thought it might be you, Nicholas."
[Voiceover] In the next room,
a tape had been set running to record
the long awaited confession.
Nicholas said to him,
"We've got absolutely
top flight information.
You were a spy, you betrayed us all,
you betrayed me, your old pal,"
and one thing or another,
"But what we are prepared to do
in return for a confession
that you did do that,
and of course ceased to spy in 1949,
we will guarantee you immunity from
"prosecution and publicity."
His reaction was that he would,
if Nicholas Elliott
came back the next day,
he would prepare a document
in which he would set
out the precise position.
[Voiceover] There is
still no public record
of this encounter, but the
consensus of leaks and briefings
is that Elliott and Philby
then had further meetings,
culminating in Philby handing
over a written confession.
Exactly what was in it I was never told,
but it wasn't very long,
but it did include the important fact
that he ceased to spy in 1949,
which they were able
to tell the Americans.
[Voiceover] Elliott
filed a report to London
and flew on to Africa, telling Lunn
that Philby was ready to cooperate
and didn't need special surveillance.
The hope was that he would
either come back to London
and make himself available for interview,
or alternatively, he
would remain in Beirut,
and again, MI5 would be
able to interview him,
at length, and he would
in effect become an asset
of the intelligence community.
[Voiceover] On that basis, Peter Lunn
made an arrangement to see Philby later
and went off skiing in the mountains.
Five days later, a winter
storm struck Beirut.
During the afternoon,
Philby had left the flat
to meet his KGB contact.
He and Eleanor had been
invited to dinner that evening
by friends from the British embassy.
As the hours slipped by, Kim phoned to say
he'd meet her at the party.
Malcolm Davidson was
one of the other guests.
It was rather like
a little mansion block
in West Kensington.
It was a long dark corridor
with rooms off either side
and sort of stained glass windows,
and I remember it quite clearly
going right through and
then finding the dining room
set at the end there,
and we were sort of talking
and drinking and hanging about,
and turns out that the spare girl there
was Eleanor Philby
waiting for her husband.
(belly dance music)
The first thought that crossed our minds
was that he had had been
too heavy with the drink,
and therefore he'd just sort of collapsed
on the street corner, and
somebody had taken him
to the hospital.
Eventually people
said, "He's always late.
It's ridiculous, we'll start without him."
I remember feeling upset for Eleanor
because she was obviously
very upset herself,
and I suppose she must've thought
that something serious had happened.
[Voiceover] What had
happened was that Kim Philby
had gone down to the
port with a KGB guide,
and by morning, was on a Russian freighter
bound for the Soviet Union.
(dramatic march music)
(tanks rumbling)
Some things don't change much in Moscow.
The victory over Hitler was
fresher in the mind then,
the power of the state unarguable.
Maybe Philby felt he was on
the right side of history,
but it was not a hero's
welcome he was given.
He arrived in Moscow, what
he described as going home,
to find that he was regarded
with some suspicion,
that everything that he
had worked for was seen,
on second thoughts, by the Russians,
too good to be true.
I mean, could British
intelligence really be so slack
that they allowed so much information
to escape and handed over to the Russians?
It was just impossible to believe.
[Voiceover] He was given an apartment
just a few hundred meters from
where the parade rolled by,
but it was more like
house arrest than freedom.
Mikhail Lyubimov was a KGB officer
who became a good friend of Philby's.
Our service expected the British
may kill him any time, even in Moscow,
even in the Red Square
because at that time, there was
a magnified fear of killings
because under Stalin,
the traitors were killed.
[Voiceover] Stalin
the man was long gone,
but Stalin the mindset was alive and well.
The KGB didn't breathe a
word about Philby's arrival.
The British government line,
in letters from the ambassador in Beirut,
was that they didn't
know where Philby was.
It is possible that he was
either on a trip for
journalistic purposes,
or, being somewhat irregular of habits,
he had gone off on a lost weekend.
It was March before the newspapers
even mentioned his absence.
We had the papers in bed,
and there was a little column,
tiny little bit at the
bottom of the Observer
saying our reporter is missing.
I suppose in a way, one
sort of half believed
that he had gone, you know?
To Moscow.
I mean, what else was he doing?
[Voiceover] In July, some five months
after his disappearance,
the truth came out.
It's quite difficult
when it's your father.
It took me a long time to
sort of really come to terms
with the idea that other people hated him,
and you know, I thought, well, you know,
he's a hero to the Russians.
[Voiceover] Not exactly.
Philby found he was not even allowed
to enter KGB headquarters,
nor did he have any rank
in the organization he had served so long.
No agent can be trusted completely.
He had to be checked all the time,
and Kim, still, though he
was a very valuable agent
and the pride of the Soviet intelligence,
still his flat was controlled,
he was forbidden to meet foreigners.
Of course, nobody was afraid
that he was going to spy
for the Brits again.
They were afraid that he might declare
that he wants to go back, I think.
This is the main menace, the main threat.
[Voiceover] To reduce that threat,
they allowed his family
to come and see him.
Visiting Russia was rare in those days.
You'd go to the embassy and say,
there's a visa been arranged
for me by my father.
Where does he live?
I don't know.
What does he do?
I don't know.
And this woman, on one occasion,
was getting very ratty,
so I leant forward, looking
round quite carefully,
and I said, "He works for the KGB."
She scuttled off, and we got our visa.
Josephine came rather regularly,
but the relationship with Eleanor,
so fond in Beirut, withered in the gloom
of the Soviet Union.
I think her stay in
Russia was not a success.
For one thing, she never
learned enough Russian
even to be able to read the
names of metro stations.
I think she became a
sort of burden to him.
I don't really blame
her for not liking it,
and I think she was absolutely horrified
at what Dad had done, and I don't think
she had had any clue 'cause otherwise,
she could have coped with it better.
[Voiceover] His university
friend Guy Burgess
had died a few months
after Philby's arrival.
He was never allowed to see him again.
A morose Donald Maclean
and his wife Melinda
were practically the limit
of their social circle.
The once loved Eleanor
simply didn't fit in.
He, in fact, I think,
wanted to get rid of her,
and I think started an
affair with Melinda Maclean,
which eventually of course drove her out.
She once said, "What's more
important-me or the party?"
And he said, "Don't be silly, the Party."
That did not go down well.
And probably he might've
said that to all of us too.
That's the way he thought.
[Voiceover] Nicholas
Elliott's brief trip to Beirut
had turned decided septic.
The public were asking
if Philby was a traitor,
why hadn't he been arrested?
As with everything else,
there were theories, not answers.
I'm convinced that this was
a plot by White, Hollis,
and anybody else including Nicholas,
who might be interested to induce Philby
to get the hell out of it
because the last thing they wanted
was any kind of trial in England.
There were people who said
this is a disaster, you know,
and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves
letting him go like that.
We should've roped him a lot earlier,
and put him in prison where he belongs.
But I think an awful lot of people,
certainly I thought, you know,
thank God he's buggered off.
We shan't be troubled with him again.
[Voiceover] If that
was a deliberate plan,
some key people don't seem
to have been party to it.
The whole defection is a catastrophe.
The security service emphatically
had never contemplated
that Philby would take
that course of action.
That was simply not on the agenda.
Could be just incompetence.
Never underrate that possibility.
[Voiceover] To MI5,
incompetence had been the hallmark
of the whole operation.
There was great frustration
that this was the Secret
Intelligence Service
who had taken over quite a
sophisticated detailed operation
and planned interview, and
that they had bungled it.
[Voiceover] In the first place,
if there had been a confession,
the recording of it was useless.
Since none of them were technicians
and because it was a very hot day,
the window had been left over,
and when the recording was played back.
The noise of the traffic
outside was so great
you couldn't hear a thing on it.
He was a great fellow for
making a hash of everything
but always getting away with it.
[Voiceover] And the
typewritten confession
Elliott got from Philby
caused even more problems.
When that document
was examined in London,
it became clear that it was worthless,
but it was very skillfully crafted,
and the view was that this was not
a spontaneous reaction
to an offer of immunity,
that it had been built up
over quite a long period,
that a lot of thought and
planning had gone into it.
[Voiceover] By, of course, the KGB.
All this was coordinated with Russians.
It was a game played
by Philby with Elliott,
and nothing else.
It was a game to get as much
information as possible,
to take the right decision.
[Voiceover] Whether that's
just KGB propaganda or not,
it was pretty much the conclusion
that the bosses in London came to.
This was fairly good
evidence that Kim Philby
had been expecting an
immunity from prosecution,
and that the approach that had
been made by Nicholas Elliott
had been anticipated because of a tip off.
[Voiceover] The whole
episode was a lethal blow
to the values and attitudes
which had underpinned
the Secret Intelligence Service
for more than a generation.
Whoever had warned Philby in advance,
it was clear that good
breeding and good manners
were no guarantee of
loyalty to the nation.
The entire case of the
Cambridge spies was reopened
as a major investigation,
and there was a pursuit of
a likely mole within MI5.
It infected SIS,
the whole British
intelligence establishment,
with a paranoia.
In fact, they devoted the next 20 years
to the wasteful pursuit of fellow officers
that they considered might be spies,
might be in the Philby mold.
(sirens wail)
♫ Sing something simple
♫ As care goes by ♫
[Voiceover] The Philby
mold was now a sorry sight.
Isolated, unemployed, and unhappy,
he might just as well have been in jail.
What perked him up was
another embarrassment
to the British.
[Voiceover] Blake
was completely missing.
There was a search
immediately with police dogs.
Prison officers examined the wall
and found a nylon ladder.
[Voiceover] Four years before,
the man who'd escaped
had been studying Arabic,
at the so-called school for spies.
Like Philby, George Blake was a KGB agent
who got a job inside British intelligence.
No immunity offer for him.
He was lured back to London, put on trial,
and sentenced to 42 years in jail.
In Moscow, the two spies became friends.
By then, Philby was said to be
drinking himself towards death.
Though he was under
protection of our directorate,
they couldn't prevent him from drinking.
And they decided to marry him.
Well, and Blake ask his wife, Ida,
to get Kim acquainted to some good girl,
and by some chance, Ida
was a friend of Rufina.
[Voiceover] Philby was
invited to join Rufina
on a blind date to go
to an ice dancing show
at the Luzhniki Stadium.
Drink hadn't dulled his taste for romance.
And to tell you frankly,
Rufina is a very charming, very beautiful,
and very clever woman, who by the way,
knew English quite well to be a wife.
[Voiceover] This flat became,
he said, his island on the sixth floor.
It's still stuffed with relics
of an Englishman in exile.
This shelf is all about him.
English books written about
the Cambridge Five and so on.
Obviously very fond of Dick Francis,
and up there, P.G. Wodehouse,
the complete collection it looks.
(classical music on radio)
The radio was his lifeline
as he settled into the
routines of a domestic life.
[Voiceover] This is London calling.
[Voiceover] But one
thing didn't change much.
His children told me he missed kippers,
marmalade, English
mustard, and good whiskey.
♫ We'll sing the old songs
♫ Like you used to do ♫
Rufina told me how he hated
her leaving his sight,
even to go see friends for he afternoon.
He became almost
childishly devoted to her.
The hardened master spy in need of love.
His isolated existence meant
that the Moscow out there
was not something he saw too much of,
but he wasn't blind to
the failures of the cause
he'd committed his life to.
♫ A room with a view ♫
He saw that the life here
was not a paradise at all.
He saw the secretiveness of life,
he saw the power of the KGB,
he saw the absence of the freedom.
[Voiceover] Solzhenitsyn spent much
of his first day in banishment
under siege by the world's press.
I remember after a good
bottle of scotch he said,
"Why are you expelling
Solzhenitsyn from Russia?"
I told him, "Look, Kim, I am
not responsible for this."
"No," he said, "You are responsible!
You are responsible for this too,
"and I'm responsible too."
So he was disillusioned, of course.
[Voiceover] As the years rolled by,
he did venture out more often
and went on holidays
around the Soviet empire,
but contact with the life he left behind
was a rare treat.
My wife spotted him, we
were just sitting down,
and she spotted him sitting with his wife
just across from us.
I went up to him in the first interval,
and he sort of, I tapped
him on the shoulder,
and he swished round, and he said,
"As I live and breathe,
Dick Beeston and Moira!"
That sort of, I always
remember that phrase,
and immediately looked
delighted to see us.
Kim said, "How do you like it here?"
I said, "We've been here six months,
and we're having a very difficult time."
He said, "Six months?
I've been here, I think it was 16 years."
(fireworks exploding)
[Voiceover] The
uncomfortable truth for Philby
was that his value to Russia
was more symbolic than personal.
KGB suspicion faded.
They listened occasionally to his advice
about the workings of British society,
but what mattered much more to them
was that this old man was a living example
of a signal victory over the West
at a time when the skids were
under the socialist dream.
A biography of Philby
was published recently
in a Russian series called
"The Lives of Remarkable People."
It was written by a trusted journalist
called Nikolai Dolgopolov.
[Nikolai] He is here with
Marcus Wolf from Germany.
[Voiceover] He never met
Philby but came to this verdict.
He was a kind of an icon,
especially in this difficult field
of human activity called intelligence.
Maybe he was one of the greatest
and remained one of the greatest
because of his 100%
devotion to the country.
[Voiceover] Nevertheless,
it was 14 years
before the KGB allowed that icon
even to visit the secret center
of their foreign intelligence service.
(dramatic music)
His job that day, to give a masterclass
to the assembled spies on
how to survive in the field.
He started the whole
thing in a very British way,
with a joke.
[Voiceover] That he'd been
to many many intelligence
services in the world.
But for the first
time, he got to his own!
[Voiceover] He had a tip
for them about interrogations.
If ever you get hauled
in, whatever the evidence,
never admit any connection
with Soviet intelligence,
and never sign a document
implicating yourself.
So was that a joke too?
Telling them to do precisely the opposite
of what he'd done in Beirut,
or was it a message to the friends in MI6?
Once the news of his defection was public,
they'd started leaking
the confession story
to take the curse off letting him go,
but years later, Elliott may have let
a different cat out of the bag.
This was the question he was asked,
and this was his answer.
Well gentlemen, the
circumstantial evidence against me
is very strong, I know
one thing you don't know.
I am not and never have been a KGB agent,
so there is no point in talking
about the matter anymore.
And provided the person
keeps his or her nerve,
they will be all right.
George Blake lost his
nerve at the last moment.
And that's what gave him away?
That's what gave him away.
Kim Philby didn't lose his nerve
when he was interrogated in 1951,
[Voiceover] But Elliott hadn't attended
the '51 interrogation.
Was he reliving his
own encounter in Beirut
until he remembered the official line?
Philby didn't lose his nerve
when he was interrogated in 1951.
[Voiceover] It's not
surprising we can't be sure.
Spies of all stripes
shield the truth with lies.
Philby's own version was evasive.
Probably he did give
Elliott something, but what?
One of the mysteries of
the Beirut confrontation.
[Voiceover] 50 years have passed
and still they keep it secret.
It's really deeply embarrassing.
They're only human beings.
You can't expect them to announce
that they made fools of
themselves for so long.
Everything that happened
happened so long ago
that it's time it was told,
and the lessons learned.
[Voiceover] But don't bank on it.
One unglamorous possibility
is that the evidence, embarrassing or not,
no longer exists.
I think that's perfectly possible.
There is a common complaint
from the very few people
who are aware of what
is in SIS's registry.
The common complaint is
there's nothing there.
[Voiceover] But there
is a bigger barrier.
Spies may have good causes,
but few things they do
could be called good.
They want to know our secrets
but don't want us to know theirs, ever.
What the Secret Intelligence
Service does, frankly,
is employ case officers who are skilled
at persuading people to betray,
to betray their family, their
friends, their nationality,
and therefore, if you wish to continue
in the clandestine information
collection business,
you are going to have say some material
is never going to be disclosed.
(funeral march)
[Voiceover] In death,
the KGB piled on the praise
for the man they had persuaded
to betray his country.
There was George Blake among the stream
of top KGB officers, as the
Englishman they'd once left
to drink himself close to oblivion
was recast as a hero of
the dying Soviet Union.
We were sort of in a pew, as it were,
and all the sort of mourners
were going round and round.
All of the people in Moscow paying homage.
It was an horrific occasion, I found that.
Well it was an open coffin!
I mean, you now, it was.
It's just not my scene at all.
I just can't bear that.
I loved him dearly, but I
wasn't going to kiss his body.
He was a romantic.
He was a romantic
He really believed in Marx,
not officially like Brezhnev
for instance, "We're Marxists!"
And so on, but he really,
it was part of his life,
and he fought for Communism
all his life since Cambridge.
Suddenly these four men
in gumboots, dungarees,
and big brown aprons came up
with their hammers and nails,
and nailed the coffin down,
and he was buried, and
then they had a gun salute,
and that was quite special.
That end bit was the best bit
as far as we were concerned.
(gun firing)
[Voiceover] He still divides opinion.
Does his hatred of fascism in the '30s
excuse the betrayal of his countrymen
or lessen the blame for the
deaths he may have caused?
He was a British citizen,
and he betrayed British secrets.
However marvelous he
thought the reason was,
it still doesn't excuse him in the law,
so he was, by proper
definition, a traitor.
There's no other way of describing him.
I think he was almost sort
of two people in a strange way.
He did actually feel quite
strongly about friendships
on one side, and on the
other side, of course,
he was a sort of desperate traitor
who would betray his family
or his friends if necessary.
He said, "To betray,
you have to first belong",
and I didn't belong, I never belonged.
"I was a straight
penetration agent," he said,
and if the other side, in
other words the British,
were foolish enough to believe my spiel,
then that's on them.
It was their failure, not mine.
("The Platters" by The Great Pretender)
♫ Oh yes, I'm the great pretender ♫
He was just dad.
In a way, he's always been just my father.
[Voiceover] "Dad" was
Harold Adrian Russel Philby,
better known to the world as Kim,
an Englishman who spied
for the Soviet Union.
I remember him as clear as day
just with his sort of
stuttering and wah wah wah,
you know sort of real English,
you know sort of Oxford,
Cambridge type, you know?
He had everything really going for him.
It was a shame that he did what he did,
but there it was.
♫ I play the game
♫ But to my real shame ♫
The last time I spoke to that Communist,
knowing him to be a Communist
was sometime in 1934.
[Voiceover] It was a lie.
On a stormy night in Beirut,
a double life that had
lasted 30 years ended
when he defected to Russia.
He was one of the worst
traitors in history.
[Voiceover] For the rest of his life,
he lived among a people
whose language he never mastered
while his countrymen counted the cost
of trusting him with their secrets.
It infected the whole British
intelligence establishment
with a paranoia.
I mean, if Philby, good
old Philby, good old Kim
could have been a spy,
any of us could have been.
[Voiceover] Scores of
books have been written about
what Philby did, but the
man inside remains elusive.
He was just like two different
people really in one body.
It was strange.
♫ Oh yes, I'm the great pretender ♫
[Voiceover] For the investigative
writer Phillip Knightley
Philby's defection was the
start of a long pursuit.
These are the Philby letters, are they?
These are the Philby letters.
[Voiceover] How many were there roughly?
How many years did you
say you talked to him?
20 years, yes.
Your letter from India
took six weeks to reach me,
so the chance of a casual drink
presented itself too late.
However, if you're still interested,
I think there's a fair
possibility of us getting together
for a real talk in the
not too distant future.
That's how it all started.
[Voiceover] Knightley
took up Philby's invitation
to meet him.
A room had been reserved
for him by the KGB.
(phone rings)
Then the phone rang, and
a voice said, "Knightley?"
And I said yes.
He said, "Philby here."
I could hardly believe it.
He said, "Do you want to
start work straight away,
and come around for a drink
or we'll meet tomorrow?"
And I said, "Straight away,
Mr. Philby, straight away."
He said, "A neighbor of
mine will pick you up."
Well the neighbor turned
out to be his KGB minder,
his KGB gopher, and he drove me
to a small block of
flats in a nice garden,
and we went up the lift to Philby's door.
And the door opened, and there was Philby.
A smaller, less impressive
figure than I'd thought
because slightly stooped, carpet slippers,
looking very much at home.
An Englishman receiving a visitor
in his drawing room.
(opera singing)
[Voiceover] Philby's
journey to that flat in Moscow
had started here in Cambridge.
The contrast between the
gilded lives around him
and the harsh world outside
drove him towards left-wing politics.
The great fear then was the
rise fascists all over Europe.
The question was what
could people like him
do about it?
He was very lucky in that
his father, St. John Philby,
gave him 50 pounds, which in those days,
was quite a lot of money,
and he immediately with that money,
bought himself a motorcycle,
and took a train all the way to Vienna.
[Voiceover] He got there
just in time to witness
the brutal suppression of local Socialists
by the Austrian fascists.
(cannons firing)
The Nazis had just
re-introduced beheading
of political offences,
and they carted one political dissident
to the gallows on a chair
because he'd already been wounded.
These sort of things for a young man
has a very powerful impression.
[Voiceover] And so did this woman,
Alice, or Litzi, Friedman.
She was a young, worldly-wise divorcee
who was fighting fascism on the ground.
Philby fell in love almost
as soon as he met her.
He gave her his volume of Shelley's poems,
and in return got a
lesson in the realities
of an unprivileged life.
She really took him in hand.
She was two years older than he was,
and they went eventually and
lived in a very small flat
practically no money, but they worked hard
to protect the working class
against this right wing coup.
[Voiceover] After Philby defected,
Patrick Seale wrote a book about him.
Evidence of his early political views
wasn't hard to find.
Oh God.
This is the fruit of the
research into that book,
and it's a mass of stuff in there.
It is many years since
I've looked in here.
A colossal amount of stuff here.
[Voiceover] One source was a journalist
called Eric Gedye who met
the young Philby frequently
during those hectic weeks.
Kim came to see him, and was desperate,
I think, for suits to take
to the poor and socialists
who were running for their lives.
Gedye was alarmed by
what was happening there,
and the fact that the working class
had been absolutely sort of savagely
contained and crushed by the fascists.
[Voiceover] After a short
and passionate affair,
Kim married Litzi.
[Patrick] Harold Adrian Russell Philby
married to Alice, Litzi,
Friedman, Mosaich, Jew.
[Voiceover] To escape the Nazis,
the newlyweds came to London.
Here in Regents Park,
Philby had the meeting
that would change his life.
A friend of Litzi's, another
Austrian Jew called Edith,
had brought him to here to meet
a resident Soviet agent code named Otto.
Otto's advice was not what he expected.
"Don't join the Communist Party," he said,
"Create a cover story for yourself,
and get inside Britain's
ruling establishment."
They advised him very
strongly to give up Communism,
go give up left-wing views,
and pretend to be a rightist,
which he did of course.
He even went and made friends
with the German embassy
and broke completely with
all his left-wing friends.
[Voiceover] His great love
became the collateral cost
of his new mission.
He didn't actually divorce
her until after the war.
By then, he had three children
by a respectable English woman
called Aileen Furze and
was safely installed
at the heart of British intelligence.
Nobody seemed interested in the fact
that he was once married to a Communist,
had a background and belief in Communism,
been active in left-wing
politics in university.
It was just glossed over.
There was something about Philby
which inspired confidence.
He seemed like an archetypal
honest Englishman.
[Voiceover] Four
other Cambridge students
with impeccable backgrounds started spying
for the Soviets at the same time.
Two of them, Guy Burgess
and Donald Maclean,
were good friends of Philby's.
Guided by the KGB, they
all worked their way
into government jobs, passing
so many wartime secrets
to Moscow that the Russians
could scarcely believe
they were genuine.
But the end of the war plunged them
into a dangerous new world.
(upbeat jazz music)
In 1949, Philby had been
sent by MI6 to Washington.
His job was the top
secret point of liaison
between British and American intelligence.
It was a big step up.
People even spoke of him
becoming the next head of MI6.
The only cloud on his sunny horizon
was his friend Guy Burgess,
whom he'd rather incautiously
invited to stay.
Burgess, homosexual and louche,
scandalized the locals.
And there was worse to come.
[Voiceover] This is
the BBC Home Service,
and here is the news.
The Foreign Secretary made
his expected statement
in Parliament today
about the disappearance
of the two Foreign Office officials,
Mr. Maclean and Mr. Burgess.
[Voiceover] No longer was
uncle Joe an ally of the west.
To spy for the Communists
was the worst of sins.
In the anonymous buildings hear Parliament
where MI6 was housed,
there was consternation.
Unknown to the public, Maclean
was about to be interrogated
because of evidence supplied by the FBI.
Someone had obviously tipped him off.
The finger of suspicion pointed
at their bright young star in Washington.
Philby was recalled
immediately upon the defection.
He traveled back to London.
As soon ad he arrived, he was
taking to MI5's headquarters.
[Voiceover] Waiting for him
was a team of interrogators
led by Dick White, the rising talent
of the counterespionage service.
The trump card for MI5 was to produce
Litzi Friedman's passport,
showed it to him,
and it was covered with stamps
of her travels on the continent,
and he was asked, "If you were
living on two pounds a week,
how could she afford to
travel around the continent
in this way?"
And Philby was absolutely
poleaxed by that,
and he had no reply.
[Voiceover] But it
wasn't a knockout blow.
They tried to get a confession from him,
by having him interrogated
by Buster Milmo QC,
and Philby proved more
than a match for Milmo,
adopting a technique that he later told me
he'd adopted frequently in these matters.
When asked to explain something
that looked really suspicious,
he would just say, "That's interesting,
I can't explain that, it's very very,"
and go no further.
[Voiceover] MI5 thought he was guilty,
and Philby had to resign from his job,
but some colleagues in
MI6 weren't so sure.
It sort of split six.
He had his friends who felt
he's been badly done by,
and he had those who
were absolutely convinced
that he was guilty, and being British,
it was not resolved.
It was swept under the carpet.
[Voiceover] Philby
found himself in limbo,
no job with MI6 and no contact
with his friends in the KGB.
He brought his wife and now five children
down to the sleepy Sussex
town of Crowborough
and tried without much
success to get work.
Dad was all over the place.
He worked in Majorca.
He worked in Ireland.
We never knew really what he was doing.
I sort of slightly assumed you
don't question it as children
that he might've been some sort of rep.
I think people helped him, you know,
gave him the odd job or two
because he really wasn't employable.
[Voiceover] They rented
a large Victorian house,
shielded from the road by trees.
But the unresolved
question didn't go away.
Suddenly, Dad was in the
news, he was on the paper,
this is the Third Man.
[Voiceover] The man behind this headline
was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI.
He was so furious that
Philby had got off scot free
that he deliberately leaked
information to a journalist.
But the plot backfired.
Foreign Secretary Harold
Macmillan was asked
a question about it in Parliament.
And with no proof that
would stand up in court,
he had no option but to clear Philby.
This is what he said.
[Voiceover] There was
no conclude that he had,
at any time, betrayed
the interests of Britain,
or to identify him with
the so-called third man,
if there was one.
[Voiceover] Philby immediately
invited the world's press
to join him at his mother's
flat in Kensington.
[Voiceover] Mr. Harold
Philby on the right
holds a press conference to deny charges
that he was involved in the disappearance
of Burgess and Maclean.
Mr. Philby, Mr. Macmillan,
the Foreign Secretary
said there was no evidence
that you are the so-called
"Third Man who allegedly
tipped off Burgess and Maclean."
Are you satisfied with that clearance
that he gave you?
Yes, I am.
[Reporter] If there was a third man,
were you in fact the third man?
No, I was not.
I think Mum was always worried.
She said to her best friend once,
"I'm terrified Kim's going
to go to Moscow or Russia
and take John and Jo."
I was asked to resign
from the Foreign Office
because of an imprudent
association with Burgess
and as a result of his disappearance.
Beyond that, I'm afraid I have
no further comment to make.
[Voiceover] So do you
mean she knew he was a spy?
I really don't know.
I think she probably suspected.
He'd been accused!
I mean, you know, Burgess
had been living with us.
It must be very difficult not to know
although he was very very good.
He obviously was excellent
because he got away with
all the questioning by all
the sort of authorities
and came out of it.
The last time I spoke to a Communist,
knowing him to be a Communist,
was sometime in 1934.
[Voiceover] Just what
a whopper that was,
very few people knew that at that stage.
The whisper put around was that Philby
had been a middle rank civil
servant of no great importance.
Then Knightley came across a book
by a former secret agent
writing under the name
of John Whitwell.
Oh here we are.
[Voiceover] So you discovered this book?
Yeah.
There we are, "British Agent."
And of course, we quickly
found out from publishers
that John Whitwell was a pseudonym,
both a secret service pseudonym,
and an author's one as well,
and his real name was Leslie Nicholson.
His publisher eventually agreed to give us
his private address,
which was above a cafe
in the East End of London.
I went down to see him.
Very pathetic case.
Like so many people who had
been in the secret services,
he was in bitter dispute
over his pension rights,
and he felt he had been
diddled over his pension.
He was living in very
straightened circumstances,
and then I realized of course,
that all I had to do was sell him
what his life used to be like
when he was on expenses.
Towards the end of this
very boozy four hour lunch,
he said, "Phillip, I'm a bit surprised
at how little you know about Philby.
Don't you know what Philby's job was
in the secret service?"
And I said, "Well we
haven't got that far yet."
He said, "He was in charge
of the anti-Soviet section."
The anti-Soviet section of
the British Intelligence
was in the hands of a Soviet agent.
[Voiceover] But instead of jail,
Lucky Kim found himself
in what was then called
the Paris of the Middle East.
This strange twist in
his fortunes happened
because some people in MI6
couldn't bring themselves
to believe that he had betrayed him.
They went along to David
Astor of The Observer,
and the editor of The Economist,
and they said, "This man
has been grossly wronged
by the establishment, and
he should be looked after."
And they found him work.
So his period of treachery
was extended by years.
[Voiceover] So they found him work
not only as a journalist, but as a spy?
Yes.
[Voiceover] Astonishing
really, isn't it?
Yes, it was astonishing,
but then it's an astonishing world.
[Voiceover] Dick Beeston was then
Middle East correspondent
for News Chronicle.
Dick ans his wife Moira befriended Philby
when he arrived.
They noticed he drank too much,
but his charm was undeniable.
He had this stammer which people found
rather attractive in a
way, sort of tried him out
with his words, but it was
actually his good manners
and his charm which went down very well
during the time that he was sober.
[Voiceover] In those days,
the British embassy in Beirut
was housed in something
called the Spears Building.
Even today, the electricity
bills come in their name.
MI6, or "The Friends,"
as they were called,
operated from here up on the fourth floor.
The whole building is being
redeveloped as flats now,
but after the 1956 Suez Crisis,
it became the hub of a
vast intelligence web
covering the whole region.
It was very much a center.
There were a lot of sort of CIA people
buzzing round the place, and quite a lot
of British Intelligence people,
mostly based on the embassy there.
[Voiceover] Did you know who was who?
Yes, more or less we did, yes.
There was a man called Paul Paulson
who was the head of
MI6 operation in Beirut
who actually had been at school
with Kim Philby at Westminster.
[Voiceover] One of the embassy insiders
was John Julius Norwich.
Diplomacy, like spying,
was still very much
a gentleman's game.
This is the main embassy team
after the new ambassador
Moore Crossthwaite
had presented his credentials.
[Voiceover] Which one was he?
He's the one in the middle here.
Myself, Max Perotti our
consul, Alec Brodie,
our military attache, Paul Paulson,
he was the head of MI6 in the embassy,
and John Selwyn, who I
see is also in uniform,
an enormous display of medals.
I cannot exactly remember what he did.
[Voiceover] In the summer heat,
embassy staff were allowed to flee
to the hills every afternoon.
The custom in those days
was to drink before you drove.
Next to the British embassy,
there was a very pleasant
little establishment
called Joe's Bar, and several of us
used to congregate in
Joe's Bar at one o'clock
in order to have a couple of stiff ones
to help us drive up the
mountains for lunch.
There was Paul Paulson,
John Julius Norwich,
and Colonel Brody, the military attache.
It was a quite amusing
little group of people.
[Voiceover] So more of a
sort of spooks' bar, was it?
Yeah.
[Voiceover] In 1975, the
streets around the embassy
were overwhelmed by civil war.
In the shadow of those scarred buildings,
I found someone who remembered
where the bar had once been.
[Voiceover] And what was Joe's Bar like?
Was it a nice bar?
[Voiceover] It became one of Philby's
favorite drinking dens.
Over there, that yellow
building behind the trees
is the British Embassy.
They'd just step down here to the bar.
[John] You went in, there
was the bar on your right.
There was a window not more
than 12, 15 feet across.
It had two or three little tables
at one of which was Kim
who was part of the furniture.
I mean I was never there
when he wasn't there.
[Voiceover] And in what state was he?
Speechless.
I mean, perhaps he could
speak, but he didn't speak.
You said, "Hello Kim,"
and he said, "Hello."
And then you went and ordered your drink,
and everybody started talking,
and Kim just went on sitting
there at the back table.
He didn't even join us.
He didn't get up and join the party.
He just sat at the back.
On the other hand, I think he
listened very very carefully
to everything we were saying
because of the great mysteries of Kim
was that he never went
to a press conference
or anything like that.
You know, if some VIP
arrived, Kim was not there,
but every Sunday in the Observer,
frequently on the front page,
this brilliantly written account
from H.A.R. Philby, Beirut,
and we always wondered where he did it,
and how got the information
because he never seemed
to move from the bar.
[Voiceover] In fact, Philby's main base
was the Normandy Hotel, and it was here,
late in 1958, that a KGB agent
finally made contact again.
Philby said later that he felt his heart
pounding with excitement as he realized
he was back in the spying business.
But behind his cover story,
there were glimpses of turmoil inside.
At the end of a long evening,
my wife was sitting next to
him in Joe's Bar actually,
and she said, "Oh, were
you the third man?"
And he said, "My dear, if
you had a great friend",
and you knew that you had
some information about him
that would get him into enormous trouble,
what would you do?
"I always valued friendship
more than isms."
It was a sort of confession in a way,
but in fact in a way,
it wasn't a confession
because he was really more
interested in isms than loyalty.
[Voiceover] In 1960,
the British Embassy moved
into a new building on the Corniche.
Well this would be the view
that the British ambassador would have had
in those days.
Beautiful.
Patrick Seale has just
joined the press corps
as Philby's backup on the Observer.
I think, with retrospect, I can say
that he was trying to ingratiate himself
with the British authorities,
and persuade people,
particularly in the intelligence services,
that he had been falsely accused,
that he was totally loyal,
that I think was his ambition.
I think there was a certain resentment
that he'd been parachuted in,
they felt, to the corps, you know
rather than having earned
his stripes on the way up
because he had been
parachuted in, by the Friends.
[Voiceover] Alan Munro, standing here
behind the ambassador,
was then press attache
at the embassy.
Oddly enough, some years later,
I found the card which
Kim Philby had given me.
HAR Philby, The Observer, The Economist,
Hotel Normandy Beirut,
and on the back there,
he's written this map,
Rue Kantari, and so on,
and how to find his block of flats.
[Voiceover] Well this
is Rue Kantari today,
and up there on the fifth floor
is the flat where Philby lived.
It was the end of the Christian quarter,
over looking the port,
a quite sensational view
of Beirut there.
It was very comfortable, attractive,
and a good place for parties really.
[Voiceover] Parties.
Philby was famously
charming when they started,
often drunk by the time they ended.
And we all said, what
Kim really needs to do
is to find a really nice girl
who will keep him on
the straight and narrow.
And who he found was Eleanor,
who had been the wife of Saw Brewery
of the New York Times,
who was the only woman in Beirut
who drank much more than Kim did.
They loved going down to
the beach, often with a bag
full of little tiny bottles
of different sorts of drink,
which they would consume
and struggle to come up
from the beach, often falling
down, bruising themselves.
[Voiceover] It was hard to
remember that back in England
he still had a wife and five children.
One afternoon, Dick and Moira
Beeston met him out shopping.
"I've had great news, dear," he said.
"Come and we must celebrate.
Come and have a drink at the Normandy."
And he produced this cable
saying his wife had died.
We were very shocked about that,
but he said it was the
best thing for everybody.
He said, "You know,
she's been terribly ill
and hurting herself, and you know,
it was the best way out for everyone."
[Voiceover] Her ungrieving husband
returned to normal business
and soon married Eleanor.
For a few months or so, they seemed
very much in love and
not drinking very much,
and rather charming, and then
gradually it deteriorated,
and they both used to drink enormously.
Yes I think that is certainly true.
Definitely, yes.
Yes, indeed, yes.
They were well suited on
that line, yes, certainly.
[Voiceover] Lorraine Copeland
was Eleanor's best friend in Beirut.
She was married to a man
called Miles Copeland
who did freelance work for the CIA.
This brings it all back.
It was a round of parties.
We lived at La Vie Diplomatique,
and we lived a very pleasant life.
[Voiceover] Her son, also called Miles,
was then at school in Beirut.
The Philbys were often
guests at his parents' house.
The Philbys were always there,
and he was always drunk
and always stuttering,
and I remember saying once to my father,
"Why are we always with the Philbys?"
And he said, "Shut up."
He then told me later on
why I should've shut up
is because he was told by the CIA,
look we don't trust this guy.
Since you're in Beirut,
keep an eye on him,
and it turns out, the
best way to keep an eye
on Kim Philby was to invite
him to all the parties.
[Voiceover] At this point,
a man called Nicholas Elliott took over
as MI6 chief in Beirut.
Years later, he would make, for a spy,
a rare appearance on television
to talk about his work.
I got involved int his
sort of work before the war,
and I think one of the attractions,
from my point of view,
was firstly of course one
felt it was worthwhile,
and secondly, as such, it was
a very pleasant atmosphere
in which to work, and an
enormously high proportion
of one's colleagues, male and female,
were personal friends.
[Voiceover] Not least, Kim Philby,
whose charmed Mediterranean life
Elliot had done much to engineer,
and once in Beirut, he
continued to favor him.
I remember the head of the
MI6 station coming to see me
to say, "I just want to tell you about"
one of the correspondents
here, a very senior one.
His name is Kim Philby,
and he reports for the
Observer and for the Economist,
and I just want to let you
know he used to be one of us,
"and you can trust him with information."
And so I did.
[Voiceover] And who was that?
Who was the head of station?
The head of the station
was Nicholas Elliott.
[Voiceover] Elliott had
been to Eton and Cambridge,
but he wore his expensive
education lightly.
I went one day to his flat for lunch,
vast flat very much like
an ambassadorial set up,
but he was not a man who
people took very seriously,
perhaps mistakenly so.
He was very fond of telling
rather risque jokes,
and at lunch he was full of these stories,
and he gave the impression of a man
who simply liked to enjoy himself.
[Voiceover] For two
years, Philby was in clover.
But just as Elliott's
tour of duty in Beirut
was coming to an end, a
conversation took place
130 miles south in
Israel, which would turn
Philby's life upside down.
Philby became the focus of attention
in a relatively casual conversation
between Victor Rothschild,
who had been an MI5 officer
during the Second World War,
and a woman called Flora Solomon
at a drinks party in Tel Aviv.
[Voiceover] This is
the marriage certificate
of Kim Philby to his recently
deceased wife, Aileen.
Who was the witness?
Flora Solomon.
Flora Solomon complained
about some articles
which had been written by
Kim Philby in the Observer.
She felt they were anti-Zionist,
and she remarked to Victor Rothschild
that this was was pretty
rich coming from Kim Philby
on the basis that Philby
had in fact approached her
at the beginning of the war
and had pitched her to join the Comintern,
to quote, "work for peace."
[Voiceover] Chapman
Pincher, Harry to his friends,
is approaching 100, and a legend
among spy hunting journalists.
He knew Victor Rothschild well,
and says Flora actually went even further.
She said, "Look, there's
something I must tell you."
I know that Philby was a spy,
and I've known a long time,
and it's been on my conscience,
but I'd like you to know
"that I know he was working
for the KGB" is what she said.
[Voiceover] The popular myth
about the elite secret services
was that great decisions were
taken over game of billiards
in the clubs of London.
All of the main player in
the drama that followed
came from this world.
Victor Rothschild left
the security service,
but he was still in very close contact
with several senior MI5
officers including Dick White,
and he reported to Dick
White that this conversation
had taken place.
[Voiceover] By then,
White, Philby's MI5 adversary
in 1951, had been transferred
to the top job at MI6.
Sir Dick and Hollis,
who was then head of MI5,
got their hands together and decided
they'd have to do something.
But they would do, and this
thing I think is terrible
because it happened so often,
they decided under no circumstances
would he be prosecuted in any way,
whatever he might admit, but
in return for a confession,
they would give him total immunity,
not only from prosecution
but from publicity.
In other words, the whole thing
would be completely hushed up.
[Voiceover] But there were tensions
between the two branches
of British intelligence.
SIS, as MI6 is officially called,
is now over there across the Thames.
The normal procedure was for them
to hand a matter like this
over to MI5, the spy catching service
just down the road.
Accordingly, MI5 were preparing
one of their top interrogators
for the confrontation.
Arthur Martin was
briefed and ready to go,
and at that 11th hour, Dick White decided
that it should be an SIS officer
who should make the
approach to Kim Philby,
not Arthur Martin.
[Voiceover] What had happened, it seems,
is that Nicholas Elliott
had returned from Beirut
and got wind of what was going on.
He put the case to his boss
that he should be the person
sent to confront Philby.
Surprisingly, White agreed.
His justification for this was
that Arthur Martin would
not really cut the mustard.
At the end of the Second World War,
he had been an NCO.
He had never risen above
the rank of sergeant,
and in a very class conscious world,
Dick White, who had ended up
with the rank of brigadier,
felt very strongly that Arthur
would not impress Kim Philby.
So they told Elliott, and
Elliott confirmed this to me
that he had to say to
Philby that they knew
he had ceased to spy in 1949,
and the reason for that was
that that wast just before
Philby had gone to America,
so if they could get a statement from him
saying he had ceased to spy in 1949,
the Americans could be assured
that he had not give away
any of their secrets
because he had ceased to be a spy
before he went to Washington.
[Voiceover] So Elliott
arrived back in Beirut
to confront Philby.
But when?
The usual story is that he
came back in January '63,
but according to Eleanor Philby,
in her book about these events,
Elliott actually came back in December,
just before Christmas.
He checked into a discreet hotel
where he wouldn't be recognized
and took Kim and herself
out to an expensive meal.
There was the usual fund of
doubtful jokes from Elliott,
she says, but the gaiety was false.
And whatever was said
privately between them
made Kim so depressed
that he wouldn't go out
over Christmas and led
to him drinking so much
that he cracked his head
open on the radiator
in their bathroom on New Year's Day.
What I saw was a man who I thought
was simply a drunk.
He'd fallen down.
He was wounded, he had a
wound somewhere on his head,
I think, he was weeping
quite substantially.
I had never seen a grown
man weep as much as he.
He was clearly frightened.
I thought it was just drunkenness.
It was only later that I understood
that he was under tremendous pressure
and was worried that the Russians
would not save him in time.
[Voiceover] So if the
official story is right,
and the actual confrontation with Elliott
was in Mid-January, did
Elliott make an extra trip
to warn his friend?
Or did Eleanor get it wrong?
Or did someone else deliver the news
which ruined the Philbys' Christmas?
Here's one possible answer.
In December of 1962,
I went to a reception
given by my ambassador,
Moore Crossthwaite, and
one of the guests there,
indeed I think the principle guest,
was Sir Antony Blunt, who
had apparently come out
to Beirut on a rather unlikely
quest for a frog orchid.
[Voiceover] Blunt was then
Keeper of the Queen's Pictures.
Within 18 months, he
would secretly confess
to being one of the Cambridge spies,
recruited at the same time as Kim Philby.
But in December 1962, he
was still a close friend
of Victor Rothschild, whom he'd known
since their Cambridge
days, and both of them
were friends of Dick White.
The reception was, I
think, given in his honor.
He seemed perfectly relaxed
and was obviously off to do
a bit of hiking in the hills.
Just what had brought him out at the time,
in reality, I couldn't say.
[Voiceover] Could it really
have been that frog orchid?
I went to see Andre Schuiteman,
a world orchid specialist.
Here we have the orchid library.
There are so many orchids
they have their own library in Kew,
with thousands of books and journals.
We have here the book "Orchids
of Britain and Ireland,"
and here we have the frog orchid.
It's relatively common throughout Britain,
so you can see all the green.
[Voiceover] And you as an expert
would say that the frog
orchids simply don't grow in?
No, they don't grow in Lebanon.
There's a book about orchids of Lebanon.
There's an index, so it's not in Lebanon.
It's not in Lebanon.
[Voiceover] So you're
confident that if Antony Blunt
went to Lebanon, it would not have been
to see a frog orchid?
Definitely not.
It was clearly a lie, can't be true.
[Voiceover] This is the
ambassador's residence
where Blunt was staying
as a private guest.
Philby's flat was a short walk away.
There's no independent
evidence that they met but.
It seems inconceivable to me
that Blunt would have traveled to Beirut
at the time without having seen Philby,
knowing that they were old friends
and with many friends in common.
[Voiceover] Had Blunt picked up a clue
in something those friends had said
and come to warn his fellow spy?
(foghorn blares)
In early January, Philby
got a call from the embassy.
They said they wanted him
to come to a private flat
to meet the new local head of MI6,
skiing fanatic Peter Lunn.
When he arrived there, who should it be?
[Voiceover] Not Peter Lunn.
But Nicholas Elliott.
According to Nicholas, his words were,
"I thought it might be you, Nicholas."
[Voiceover] In the next room,
a tape had been set running to record
the long awaited confession.
Nicholas said to him,
"We've got absolutely
top flight information.
You were a spy, you betrayed us all,
you betrayed me, your old pal,"
and one thing or another,
"But what we are prepared to do
in return for a confession
that you did do that,
and of course ceased to spy in 1949,
we will guarantee you immunity from
"prosecution and publicity."
His reaction was that he would,
if Nicholas Elliott
came back the next day,
he would prepare a document
in which he would set
out the precise position.
[Voiceover] There is
still no public record
of this encounter, but the
consensus of leaks and briefings
is that Elliott and Philby
then had further meetings,
culminating in Philby handing
over a written confession.
Exactly what was in it I was never told,
but it wasn't very long,
but it did include the important fact
that he ceased to spy in 1949,
which they were able
to tell the Americans.
[Voiceover] Elliott
filed a report to London
and flew on to Africa, telling Lunn
that Philby was ready to cooperate
and didn't need special surveillance.
The hope was that he would
either come back to London
and make himself available for interview,
or alternatively, he
would remain in Beirut,
and again, MI5 would be
able to interview him,
at length, and he would
in effect become an asset
of the intelligence community.
[Voiceover] On that basis, Peter Lunn
made an arrangement to see Philby later
and went off skiing in the mountains.
Five days later, a winter
storm struck Beirut.
During the afternoon,
Philby had left the flat
to meet his KGB contact.
He and Eleanor had been
invited to dinner that evening
by friends from the British embassy.
As the hours slipped by, Kim phoned to say
he'd meet her at the party.
Malcolm Davidson was
one of the other guests.
It was rather like
a little mansion block
in West Kensington.
It was a long dark corridor
with rooms off either side
and sort of stained glass windows,
and I remember it quite clearly
going right through and
then finding the dining room
set at the end there,
and we were sort of talking
and drinking and hanging about,
and turns out that the spare girl there
was Eleanor Philby
waiting for her husband.
(belly dance music)
The first thought that crossed our minds
was that he had had been
too heavy with the drink,
and therefore he'd just sort of collapsed
on the street corner, and
somebody had taken him
to the hospital.
Eventually people
said, "He's always late.
It's ridiculous, we'll start without him."
I remember feeling upset for Eleanor
because she was obviously
very upset herself,
and I suppose she must've thought
that something serious had happened.
[Voiceover] What had
happened was that Kim Philby
had gone down to the
port with a KGB guide,
and by morning, was on a Russian freighter
bound for the Soviet Union.
(dramatic march music)
(tanks rumbling)
Some things don't change much in Moscow.
The victory over Hitler was
fresher in the mind then,
the power of the state unarguable.
Maybe Philby felt he was on
the right side of history,
but it was not a hero's
welcome he was given.
He arrived in Moscow, what
he described as going home,
to find that he was regarded
with some suspicion,
that everything that he
had worked for was seen,
on second thoughts, by the Russians,
too good to be true.
I mean, could British
intelligence really be so slack
that they allowed so much information
to escape and handed over to the Russians?
It was just impossible to believe.
[Voiceover] He was given an apartment
just a few hundred meters from
where the parade rolled by,
but it was more like
house arrest than freedom.
Mikhail Lyubimov was a KGB officer
who became a good friend of Philby's.
Our service expected the British
may kill him any time, even in Moscow,
even in the Red Square
because at that time, there was
a magnified fear of killings
because under Stalin,
the traitors were killed.
[Voiceover] Stalin
the man was long gone,
but Stalin the mindset was alive and well.
The KGB didn't breathe a
word about Philby's arrival.
The British government line,
in letters from the ambassador in Beirut,
was that they didn't
know where Philby was.
It is possible that he was
either on a trip for
journalistic purposes,
or, being somewhat irregular of habits,
he had gone off on a lost weekend.
It was March before the newspapers
even mentioned his absence.
We had the papers in bed,
and there was a little column,
tiny little bit at the
bottom of the Observer
saying our reporter is missing.
I suppose in a way, one
sort of half believed
that he had gone, you know?
To Moscow.
I mean, what else was he doing?
[Voiceover] In July, some five months
after his disappearance,
the truth came out.
It's quite difficult
when it's your father.
It took me a long time to
sort of really come to terms
with the idea that other people hated him,
and you know, I thought, well, you know,
he's a hero to the Russians.
[Voiceover] Not exactly.
Philby found he was not even allowed
to enter KGB headquarters,
nor did he have any rank
in the organization he had served so long.
No agent can be trusted completely.
He had to be checked all the time,
and Kim, still, though he
was a very valuable agent
and the pride of the Soviet intelligence,
still his flat was controlled,
he was forbidden to meet foreigners.
Of course, nobody was afraid
that he was going to spy
for the Brits again.
They were afraid that he might declare
that he wants to go back, I think.
This is the main menace, the main threat.
[Voiceover] To reduce that threat,
they allowed his family
to come and see him.
Visiting Russia was rare in those days.
You'd go to the embassy and say,
there's a visa been arranged
for me by my father.
Where does he live?
I don't know.
What does he do?
I don't know.
And this woman, on one occasion,
was getting very ratty,
so I leant forward, looking
round quite carefully,
and I said, "He works for the KGB."
She scuttled off, and we got our visa.
Josephine came rather regularly,
but the relationship with Eleanor,
so fond in Beirut, withered in the gloom
of the Soviet Union.
I think her stay in
Russia was not a success.
For one thing, she never
learned enough Russian
even to be able to read the
names of metro stations.
I think she became a
sort of burden to him.
I don't really blame
her for not liking it,
and I think she was absolutely horrified
at what Dad had done, and I don't think
she had had any clue 'cause otherwise,
she could have coped with it better.
[Voiceover] His university
friend Guy Burgess
had died a few months
after Philby's arrival.
He was never allowed to see him again.
A morose Donald Maclean
and his wife Melinda
were practically the limit
of their social circle.
The once loved Eleanor
simply didn't fit in.
He, in fact, I think,
wanted to get rid of her,
and I think started an
affair with Melinda Maclean,
which eventually of course drove her out.
She once said, "What's more
important-me or the party?"
And he said, "Don't be silly, the Party."
That did not go down well.
And probably he might've
said that to all of us too.
That's the way he thought.
[Voiceover] Nicholas
Elliott's brief trip to Beirut
had turned decided septic.
The public were asking
if Philby was a traitor,
why hadn't he been arrested?
As with everything else,
there were theories, not answers.
I'm convinced that this was
a plot by White, Hollis,
and anybody else including Nicholas,
who might be interested to induce Philby
to get the hell out of it
because the last thing they wanted
was any kind of trial in England.
There were people who said
this is a disaster, you know,
and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves
letting him go like that.
We should've roped him a lot earlier,
and put him in prison where he belongs.
But I think an awful lot of people,
certainly I thought, you know,
thank God he's buggered off.
We shan't be troubled with him again.
[Voiceover] If that
was a deliberate plan,
some key people don't seem
to have been party to it.
The whole defection is a catastrophe.
The security service emphatically
had never contemplated
that Philby would take
that course of action.
That was simply not on the agenda.
Could be just incompetence.
Never underrate that possibility.
[Voiceover] To MI5,
incompetence had been the hallmark
of the whole operation.
There was great frustration
that this was the Secret
Intelligence Service
who had taken over quite a
sophisticated detailed operation
and planned interview, and
that they had bungled it.
[Voiceover] In the first place,
if there had been a confession,
the recording of it was useless.
Since none of them were technicians
and because it was a very hot day,
the window had been left over,
and when the recording was played back.
The noise of the traffic
outside was so great
you couldn't hear a thing on it.
He was a great fellow for
making a hash of everything
but always getting away with it.
[Voiceover] And the
typewritten confession
Elliott got from Philby
caused even more problems.
When that document
was examined in London,
it became clear that it was worthless,
but it was very skillfully crafted,
and the view was that this was not
a spontaneous reaction
to an offer of immunity,
that it had been built up
over quite a long period,
that a lot of thought and
planning had gone into it.
[Voiceover] By, of course, the KGB.
All this was coordinated with Russians.
It was a game played
by Philby with Elliott,
and nothing else.
It was a game to get as much
information as possible,
to take the right decision.
[Voiceover] Whether that's
just KGB propaganda or not,
it was pretty much the conclusion
that the bosses in London came to.
This was fairly good
evidence that Kim Philby
had been expecting an
immunity from prosecution,
and that the approach that had
been made by Nicholas Elliott
had been anticipated because of a tip off.
[Voiceover] The whole
episode was a lethal blow
to the values and attitudes
which had underpinned
the Secret Intelligence Service
for more than a generation.
Whoever had warned Philby in advance,
it was clear that good
breeding and good manners
were no guarantee of
loyalty to the nation.
The entire case of the
Cambridge spies was reopened
as a major investigation,
and there was a pursuit of
a likely mole within MI5.
It infected SIS,
the whole British
intelligence establishment,
with a paranoia.
In fact, they devoted the next 20 years
to the wasteful pursuit of fellow officers
that they considered might be spies,
might be in the Philby mold.
(sirens wail)
♫ Sing something simple
♫ As care goes by ♫
[Voiceover] The Philby
mold was now a sorry sight.
Isolated, unemployed, and unhappy,
he might just as well have been in jail.
What perked him up was
another embarrassment
to the British.
[Voiceover] Blake
was completely missing.
There was a search
immediately with police dogs.
Prison officers examined the wall
and found a nylon ladder.
[Voiceover] Four years before,
the man who'd escaped
had been studying Arabic,
at the so-called school for spies.
Like Philby, George Blake was a KGB agent
who got a job inside British intelligence.
No immunity offer for him.
He was lured back to London, put on trial,
and sentenced to 42 years in jail.
In Moscow, the two spies became friends.
By then, Philby was said to be
drinking himself towards death.
Though he was under
protection of our directorate,
they couldn't prevent him from drinking.
And they decided to marry him.
Well, and Blake ask his wife, Ida,
to get Kim acquainted to some good girl,
and by some chance, Ida
was a friend of Rufina.
[Voiceover] Philby was
invited to join Rufina
on a blind date to go
to an ice dancing show
at the Luzhniki Stadium.
Drink hadn't dulled his taste for romance.
And to tell you frankly,
Rufina is a very charming, very beautiful,
and very clever woman, who by the way,
knew English quite well to be a wife.
[Voiceover] This flat became,
he said, his island on the sixth floor.
It's still stuffed with relics
of an Englishman in exile.
This shelf is all about him.
English books written about
the Cambridge Five and so on.
Obviously very fond of Dick Francis,
and up there, P.G. Wodehouse,
the complete collection it looks.
(classical music on radio)
The radio was his lifeline
as he settled into the
routines of a domestic life.
[Voiceover] This is London calling.
[Voiceover] But one
thing didn't change much.
His children told me he missed kippers,
marmalade, English
mustard, and good whiskey.
♫ We'll sing the old songs
♫ Like you used to do ♫
Rufina told me how he hated
her leaving his sight,
even to go see friends for he afternoon.
He became almost
childishly devoted to her.
The hardened master spy in need of love.
His isolated existence meant
that the Moscow out there
was not something he saw too much of,
but he wasn't blind to
the failures of the cause
he'd committed his life to.
♫ A room with a view ♫
He saw that the life here
was not a paradise at all.
He saw the secretiveness of life,
he saw the power of the KGB,
he saw the absence of the freedom.
[Voiceover] Solzhenitsyn spent much
of his first day in banishment
under siege by the world's press.
I remember after a good
bottle of scotch he said,
"Why are you expelling
Solzhenitsyn from Russia?"
I told him, "Look, Kim, I am
not responsible for this."
"No," he said, "You are responsible!
You are responsible for this too,
"and I'm responsible too."
So he was disillusioned, of course.
[Voiceover] As the years rolled by,
he did venture out more often
and went on holidays
around the Soviet empire,
but contact with the life he left behind
was a rare treat.
My wife spotted him, we
were just sitting down,
and she spotted him sitting with his wife
just across from us.
I went up to him in the first interval,
and he sort of, I tapped
him on the shoulder,
and he swished round, and he said,
"As I live and breathe,
Dick Beeston and Moira!"
That sort of, I always
remember that phrase,
and immediately looked
delighted to see us.
Kim said, "How do you like it here?"
I said, "We've been here six months,
and we're having a very difficult time."
He said, "Six months?
I've been here, I think it was 16 years."
(fireworks exploding)
[Voiceover] The
uncomfortable truth for Philby
was that his value to Russia
was more symbolic than personal.
KGB suspicion faded.
They listened occasionally to his advice
about the workings of British society,
but what mattered much more to them
was that this old man was a living example
of a signal victory over the West
at a time when the skids were
under the socialist dream.
A biography of Philby
was published recently
in a Russian series called
"The Lives of Remarkable People."
It was written by a trusted journalist
called Nikolai Dolgopolov.
[Nikolai] He is here with
Marcus Wolf from Germany.
[Voiceover] He never met
Philby but came to this verdict.
He was a kind of an icon,
especially in this difficult field
of human activity called intelligence.
Maybe he was one of the greatest
and remained one of the greatest
because of his 100%
devotion to the country.
[Voiceover] Nevertheless,
it was 14 years
before the KGB allowed that icon
even to visit the secret center
of their foreign intelligence service.
(dramatic music)
His job that day, to give a masterclass
to the assembled spies on
how to survive in the field.
He started the whole
thing in a very British way,
with a joke.
[Voiceover] That he'd been
to many many intelligence
services in the world.
But for the first
time, he got to his own!
[Voiceover] He had a tip
for them about interrogations.
If ever you get hauled
in, whatever the evidence,
never admit any connection
with Soviet intelligence,
and never sign a document
implicating yourself.
So was that a joke too?
Telling them to do precisely the opposite
of what he'd done in Beirut,
or was it a message to the friends in MI6?
Once the news of his defection was public,
they'd started leaking
the confession story
to take the curse off letting him go,
but years later, Elliott may have let
a different cat out of the bag.
This was the question he was asked,
and this was his answer.
Well gentlemen, the
circumstantial evidence against me
is very strong, I know
one thing you don't know.
I am not and never have been a KGB agent,
so there is no point in talking
about the matter anymore.
And provided the person
keeps his or her nerve,
they will be all right.
George Blake lost his
nerve at the last moment.
And that's what gave him away?
That's what gave him away.
Kim Philby didn't lose his nerve
when he was interrogated in 1951,
[Voiceover] But Elliott hadn't attended
the '51 interrogation.
Was he reliving his
own encounter in Beirut
until he remembered the official line?
Philby didn't lose his nerve
when he was interrogated in 1951.
[Voiceover] It's not
surprising we can't be sure.
Spies of all stripes
shield the truth with lies.
Philby's own version was evasive.
Probably he did give
Elliott something, but what?
One of the mysteries of
the Beirut confrontation.
[Voiceover] 50 years have passed
and still they keep it secret.
It's really deeply embarrassing.
They're only human beings.
You can't expect them to announce
that they made fools of
themselves for so long.
Everything that happened
happened so long ago
that it's time it was told,
and the lessons learned.
[Voiceover] But don't bank on it.
One unglamorous possibility
is that the evidence, embarrassing or not,
no longer exists.
I think that's perfectly possible.
There is a common complaint
from the very few people
who are aware of what
is in SIS's registry.
The common complaint is
there's nothing there.
[Voiceover] But there
is a bigger barrier.
Spies may have good causes,
but few things they do
could be called good.
They want to know our secrets
but don't want us to know theirs, ever.
What the Secret Intelligence
Service does, frankly,
is employ case officers who are skilled
at persuading people to betray,
to betray their family, their
friends, their nationality,
and therefore, if you wish to continue
in the clandestine information
collection business,
you are going to have say some material
is never going to be disclosed.
(funeral march)
[Voiceover] In death,
the KGB piled on the praise
for the man they had persuaded
to betray his country.
There was George Blake among the stream
of top KGB officers, as the
Englishman they'd once left
to drink himself close to oblivion
was recast as a hero of
the dying Soviet Union.
We were sort of in a pew, as it were,
and all the sort of mourners
were going round and round.
All of the people in Moscow paying homage.
It was an horrific occasion, I found that.
Well it was an open coffin!
I mean, you now, it was.
It's just not my scene at all.
I just can't bear that.
I loved him dearly, but I
wasn't going to kiss his body.
He was a romantic.
He was a romantic
He really believed in Marx,
not officially like Brezhnev
for instance, "We're Marxists!"
And so on, but he really,
it was part of his life,
and he fought for Communism
all his life since Cambridge.
Suddenly these four men
in gumboots, dungarees,
and big brown aprons came up
with their hammers and nails,
and nailed the coffin down,
and he was buried, and
then they had a gun salute,
and that was quite special.
That end bit was the best bit
as far as we were concerned.
(gun firing)
[Voiceover] He still divides opinion.
Does his hatred of fascism in the '30s
excuse the betrayal of his countrymen
or lessen the blame for the
deaths he may have caused?
He was a British citizen,
and he betrayed British secrets.
However marvelous he
thought the reason was,
it still doesn't excuse him in the law,
so he was, by proper
definition, a traitor.
There's no other way of describing him.
I think he was almost sort
of two people in a strange way.
He did actually feel quite
strongly about friendships
on one side, and on the
other side, of course,
he was a sort of desperate traitor
who would betray his family
or his friends if necessary.
He said, "To betray,
you have to first belong",
and I didn't belong, I never belonged.
"I was a straight
penetration agent," he said,
and if the other side, in
other words the British,
were foolish enough to believe my spiel,
then that's on them.
It was their failure, not mine.