Young Philby (11 page)

I asked for, and received by return telegram, permission from Moscow Centre to attempt to recruit Harold Adrian Philby to work for Soviet intelligence. It goes without saying, I gave Litzi Friedman detailed instructions to be sure she and the young Philby were not being followed when she brought him to that first meeting in Regent’s Park. She was to tell him only that he would be seeing someone important. Nothing more. She was to take three different taxis, getting out each time before the hack reached the destination she had given the driver. She was to use one-way streets, walking against traffic, to disrupt any automobile-based surveillance. She was to use Harrods emporium, entering through one door, going up in the lifts, descending by a staircase, exiting into the always teeming Brompton Road by another door. The entire process was not to take less than three hours.

As for me, I employed my usual technique for avoiding surveillance. The Soviet embassy was under observation day and night. I had even spotted men with binoculars and motion picture cameras on tripods behind a venetian blind in a window diagonally across the street from our principal entrance. Along with my driver and my male secretary (who concealed himself in the boot), I got into one of our limousines in the courtyard and we set off through the gates into traffic. My driver, who was quite experienced in evasion techniques, immediately identified two automobiles following at a discreet distance. Obeying my instructions to the letter, he made no effort to lose them in the congested streets. Instead we meandered through the midmorning traffic in the general direction of Hampstead and its heath. With the heath in sight, my driver turned into a narrow one-way street going the wrong way. A British bobby a block along started to wave us down until he noticed the diplomatic license plate, at which point he contented himself with ordering us to turn off, which we did. My driver pulled into an alleyway and parked in a lot behind a Chinese restaurant long enough for my secretary to take my place in the backseat and me to retrieve from the boot an umbrella and a bowler hat. My limousine set off in one direction. With the bowler set squarely on my head, I set off on foot in the other direction. I had no difficulty blending into the late-morning crowds on the street. I went into an underground station and took the Tube, getting off and doubling back on my tracks several times until I was persuaded I was not being tailed. It was then and only then that I made my way to the Regent’s Park Tube station. Emerging from the underground, I began walking at a leisurely pace through the park in the direction of the zoo to the north. I settled onto a park bench on a little-used path and regarded my wristwatch. It was precisely eleven thirty-three. I could see the Friedman woman walking toward me from the direction of the Round House, which had been opened the previous year to accommodate a pair of gorillas. Oh, these English—if they treated their workers as well as their gorillas one could almost like them. A lean young man a head taller than Litzi Friedman walked a pace or two behind her and off to one side. When they were twenty or so paces away, I raised a forefinger—a prearranged signal asking if she was sure they had not been followed. She removed her straw hat (I noticed her hair was dyed platinum blond) and fanned her face with its brim—a prearranged signal assuring me that she had taken appropriate precautions and spotted no one behind her. She stopped to exchange a word with the young man. Smiling at him, she nodded in my direction, then started back toward the zoo. The young man approached. I stood up and offered my hand. “Hello,” I said.

He shook it. “Hello.”

“You will be the Harold Philby of whom Litzi Friedman has spoken in glowing terms.”

“Whatever she told you was surely an exaggeration. She failed to mention
your
name.”

“It’s Otto,” I said. I motioned toward the bench and we both sat down. “Do you mind if I call you Harold?”

“I prefer my nickname, Kim.”

“Kim it shall be.” I produced a pack of English cigarettes. “Smoke?”

He selected one from the cardboard package. I held the flame of my lighter to the end of his cigarette, and then to mine. The smoke from our two cigarettes intermingled as we regarded each other. Philby said, “May I assume this has to do with my app-pplication to join the Communist P-Party?”

The Friedman woman had not mentioned the stammer. “You are free to assume anything you want,” I said with a cheerful laugh, “though in this particular case you would be dead wrong.”

“Ahhh, yes. I see.”

“What do you see?”

“I see there may b-be more to this rendezvous than meets the eye.”

The night before my meeting with Philby I had gone to the trouble of writing out what I would say as if it were a script for a radio drama. I had taken to heart the advice my late predecessor had once given me with respect to recruiting agents: Tone was every bit as important as the actual words. All that remained for me to do, sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, squinting at my interlocutor because of the dazzling sunlight, was play the role I had assigned myself: I had to make him feel as if he had found a kindred spirit and a lifelong friend. “If you want to join the party,” I began, “of course they will accept you into its ranks with open arms.”

“I do want to join the party. I want to p-participate in the struggle against Fascism and corporate capitalism.”

“The struggle takes place on many levels. You can, if you choose, spend your days selling the
Daily Worker
in working-class neighborhoods. But from what I’ve heard from Miss Friedman, it would be a waste of your time and talents.”

Söhnchen—
as the scene I am describing was set in Britain, I should probably stick with the English translation of his
nom de code
, Sonny—Sonny appeared to be startled by what I said. “What are my talents?” he demanded.

A well-dressed woman wearing an ankle-length skirt came down the path, walking her dog on a silver-link leash. I waited until she was out of earshot. “You are, by background, by education, by appearance and manners, an intellectual. You are able to blend in with the bourgeoisie and pass yourself off as one. If you really want to make a significant contribution to the anti-Fascist movement, simple membership in the British Communist Party is not the ticket. The clandestine alternative I am proposing will not be without difficulty, without danger even. But the rewards in terms of personal achievement, in terms of actually bettering the lot of the world’s working classes, will be immense.”

I remember he was staring at his shoes as I went through my routine. Suddenly he looked up at me with his ice-blue eyes. “Who are you?”

“I told you, my name is Otto.”

“I was not b-born yesterday. If it p-pleases you to be known as Otto, I shall call you Otto.
But who are you
?
Whom do you represent?
”

“Does it matter?”

He let this sink in. The moment was awkward, with his question hanging unanswered—and unanswerable—between us.

I can honestly identify the precise instant I came to like Sonny as a person; as a comrade. He could have repeated his question. He could have allowed the silence to drag on, which would have been another way of insisting on a response. To his everlasting credit he shrugged. “I suppose I shall have to make do with an educated guess” is what he said.

I continued my pitch. “You came down from Cambridge—this alone will open doors for you in journalism, in the foreign service, even in His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. I am proposing that you hitch your star to the Bolshevik project of imposing proletarian order on capitalist chaos. Will you join us in the struggle against Hitlerism and international Fascism?”

“You should know that I am terrified of violence. I get sick to my stomach at the sight of b-blood.”

“Who amongst us isn’t terrified of violence?”

“You don’t understand. I tell you frankly, I am not courageous. If I were to be threatened with torture I would admit everything. I would name names. Yours first. I would die of fright if I were to be arrested.”

“Being arrested can be a marvelously liberating experience. It liberates you from the fear of being arrested.”

Sonny looked at me intently. “You are speaking from experience, aren’t you?”

I was speaking about the marvelously liberating experience of my predecessor, of course, but I couldn’t tell Sonny that. Ignaty Reif, cryptonym
Marr
, had lived in dread of being arrested by the NKVD. His hand had been shaking when he showed me the telegram from Moscow Centre summoning him home for consultations. “Don’t go, for God’s sake,” I had whispered. We were in the men’s room of a public house at the time, urinating into adjacent urinals. “I am a loyal Stalinist,” he had whispered back. “Not going would only confirm their suspicions, assuming they have any.” A month after his return to Russia, Ignaty managed to send a note to me through the wife of a cipher clerk who happened to be his wife’s sister’s niece.
Being arrested is a marvelously liberating experience,
it said.
It liberates you from the fear of being arrested.
The note was unsigned but I recognized my friend’s handwriting. The telegram from Moscow Centre that announced my promotion to
Rezident
also informed us that Ignaty Reif had been sentenced to the highest measure of punishment and shot as a German spy.

Ignaty, with his round Polish face and his Polish accent and his shiny Russian suits that were one size too large for his squat Polish body, loathed everything German, starting with the language and finishing with Adolf Hitler and his thousand-year Reich.

What I told Sonny, in response to his question, was: “I am speaking from the long and painful Russian experience under the Tsars.”

“Stalin is said to arrest people in great numbers,” he remarked.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the capitalist press,” I cautioned. “Comrade Stalin only causes guilty people to be arrested.” I tried to steer the conversation onto safer ground. “Listen, Kim, if you were to be in any danger, we would exfiltrate you well before you could be arrested.”

“To where?”

“Why, to the Soviet Union, of course.”

“I have never been to the Soviet Union.”

“You would like it.” I smiled. “It would like you.”

I saw him nodding with what can only be described as eagerness. He never hesitated. “Yes,” he said.

I was taken aback. I had expected him to put additional questions, to seek clarifications that I was under strict instructions not to provide. “Yes?” I asked a bit incredulously. “You agree to my proposition?”

He laughed. “To be honest I am not quite sure what you are p-proposing, but I am not your belt-and-braces type. I agree.”

I took his hand and we shook on an understanding that would change his life.

And mine.

4: LONDON, JULY 1934

Where the Hajj Admits to Having Something Up His Sleeve

You won’t recognize my name. Good Lord, why would you know who Miss Evelyn Sinclair is? I’m nobody. I’m here because I am the daughter of somebody, which is to say somebody important. My father, Hugh Sinclair, Admiral of His Majesty’s Fleet (retired), is the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Father, bless his heart, is old school down to his Savile gaiters. He has a mania for secrecy. He communicates with the handful of agents he has by means of what intelligence professionals curiously refer to as
dead letterboxes
. (How in heaven’s name does one
kill
a letter?) If Father is under the weather or otherwise indisposed, he has me service these postal boxes. Mind you, I am not actually a paid staff member of SIS but as we are starved for funds by our masters in the Foreign Office, this saves a salary. Father, universally known as
Quex
because of the speed with which he was thought to carry out orders when he was in the navy, takes his mania for secrecy to extremes. He keeps the service records of agents and staff in his breast pocket, one index card per person. He has been known to sit with his back to the individual he is interviewing in order to conceal his features. It was only because he and the Hajj (which is what Father has called St John Philby since this bedraggled, bearded Arabist converted to Islam) had been school chums at Westminister and Trinity that he consented to be seated facing him. The particular meeting I am recounting took place in an upper-floor parlor of Caxton House, the dilapidated building within walking distance of Victoria Rail Station that reeked of midnight oil and served SIS as an H.Q. Thick curtains had been drawn across the windows, blotting up any suggestion of daylight. Portraits of Wellington’s pink-jowled generals, each illuminated by a small brass lighting fixture, leaned off the walls as if to eavesdrop on the conversation. A carafe filled with a decent claret and four glasses had been set out on a silver tray. Besides the Hajj and Father, there were two others (I don’t include myself) present: Father’s deputies, Colonel Valentine Vivian, who had known Philby back in India before the First War, and Colonel Stewart Menzies, a Horse Guard thought by the very few not put off by an absence of evidence to be the bastard of Edward VII. (Dear Colonel Menzies has been known to get in a huff if one didn’t employ the Scottish pronunciation of his name, which was
Miniz.)
What set Father’s two deputies apart was that they loathed each other. None of the Caxton House regulars could recall having seen them speaking to one another; they communicated through memoranda that were routinely burned in ashtrays, some, so it was rumored about, before being read. Father liked the atmosphere this created. Kept the troops on the qui vive, he would say. I was, as usual, present to create a stenographic minute of the conversation—it has been said of me, with some justice, that I am the Secret Intelligence Service’s institutional memory. No glass had been set for me. Just as well. I am a lifelong teetotaler, not to mention co-chairlady of the Camden Temperance Society. Three minutes before the hour St John (pronounced Sin-Jin) Philby materialized at the door. He was wearing a wrinkled white suit with food stains visible on the lapels and white tennis runners. Immediately after he sat down he undid the laces. “Able to trek desert dunes weeks on end,” he muttered. “Damned feet swell up after five minutes in this asphalt jungle of yours.”