The Spy who Went into the Cold: Kim Philby, Soviet Super Spy Storyville

MUSIC: "The Great Pretender" by The Platters

# Oh, yes, I'm the great pretender... #

He was just Dad.

In a way, he's always been just my father

"Dad" was Harold Adrian Russell Philby,

better known to the world as Kim...

..an Englishman who spied for the Soviet Union.

I remember him as clear as day with his stuttering

and wah, wah, wah

sort of real English, 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 a Communist,

knowing him to be a Communist, was sometime in 1934.

THUNDER ROLLS

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.

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 paranoia.

I mean, if Philby, good old Philby,

good old Kim, could have been a spy, any of us could have been.

Scores of books have been written about what Philby did,

but the man inside remains elusive.

He was like two different people really in one body.

It was strange.

# Oh, yes, I'm the great pretender... #

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.

'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.

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 "Straightaway, Mr Philby, straightaway."

He said, "A neighbour of mine will pick you up".

Well, the neighbour 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.

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 of fascists all over Europe.

The question was what could people like him do about it?

He was lucky in that his father, St John Philby,

gave him ?50, 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.

He got there just in time to witness the brutal suppression

of local socialists by the Austrian fascists.

The Nazis had re-introduced beheading for political offences.

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 had a very powerful impression.

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 un-privileged 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.

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.

There's a colossal amount of stuff here.

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.

After a short and passionate affair, Kim married Litzi.

Harold Adrian Russell Philby married to Alice, Litzi, Friedman.

Mosaich, Jew.

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 here to meet

a resident Soviet agent codenamed 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, to 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.

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 a belief in Communism,

been active in left-wing politics at university.

It was just glossed over.

There was something about Philby which inspired confidence.

He seemed like an archetypal honest Englishman.

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.

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 scandalised the locals.

And there was worse to come.

REPORTER: 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.

No longer was Uncle Joe an ally of the West.

To spy for the Communists was the worst of sins.

In the anonymous buildings near 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 travelled back to London.

As soon as he arrived, he was taken to MI5's headquarters.

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 Friedmann'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 ?2 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.

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.

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 MI6.

He had his friends who felt he was being 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.

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 have been some sort of rep.

I think people helped him, you know,

gave him the odd job or two, because he wasn't really employable.

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.

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:

MAN READS TEXT

Philby immediately invited the world's press to join him

at his mother's flat in Kensington.

REPORTER: 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,

has said there is 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.

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.

'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.

Just what a whopper that was very few people knew 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.

'So you discovered this book?' Yep.

There we are, "British Agent".

And, of course, we quickly found out from the 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 straitened circumstances

and then I realised, 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.

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 them.

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.

'So they found him work not only as a journalist but as a spy?' Yes

'Astonishing really, isn't it?

Yes, it is astonishing but then it's an astonishing world.

Dick Beeston was then Middle East correspondent

for the News Chronicle.

Dick and 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 to help 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.

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 centre. 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.

'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 the MI6 operation in Beirut

who actually had been at school with Kim Philby at Westminster.

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.

'Which one is 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.

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 1:00 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.

Quite an amusing little group of people.

'So more of a sort of spooks' bar, was it?' Yeah.

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.

'And what was Joe's Bar like? Was it a nice bar?'

It became one of Philby's favourite drinking dens.

Over there, that yellow building behind the trees is

the British Embassy.

They'd just step down here to the bar.

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.

'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 one 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 HAR Philby, Beirut

and we always wondered where he did it and how

he got the information because he never seemed to move from the bar.

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 realised 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 value 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

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 had 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.

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.

'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, overlooking the port,

a quite sensational view of Beirut, there.

It was very comfortable, attractive, and a good place for parties really.

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 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 Sam Brewer 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 then struggle to come up

from the beach, often falling down, bruising themselves.

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 then 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."

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.

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.

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 have 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.

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 in this 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,

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.

Not least Kim Philby, whose charmed Mediterranean life

Elliot had done much to engineer.

And once in Beirut, he continued to favour 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.

'And who was that?'

Who was the head of station?

The head of the station was Nicolas Elliott.

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.

For two years, Philby was in clover.

But just as Elliot'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.

'This is the marriage certificate of Kim Philby to his recently

'deceased wife, Aileen.

'Who is the witness?

'Flora Solomon.'

Flora Solomon complained

about some articles which had been written by Kim Philby

in the Observer. She felt that they were anti-Zionist

and she remarked to Victor Rothschild that this was

pretty rich coming from Kim Philby on the basis

that Philby had approached her at the beginning of the war and had

pitched her to join the Comintern, to, quote, "work for peace".

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.

The popular myth about the elite secret services was that great

decisions were taken over games of billiards in the clubs of London.

All the main players 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.

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 the head of MI5,

got their heads together and decided they'd have to do something.

But what they would do - and this thing I think is terrible

because it has 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.

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.

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 was just before Philby

had gone to America.

So if they could get a statement from him

saying he had ceased to spy in 949,

the Americans could be assured that he had not given away any of their

secrets because he'd ceased to be a spy before he went to Washington.

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 recognised

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 a 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.

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 principal guest,

was Sir Antony Blunt, who had apparently come out to

Beirut on a rather unlikely quest for a frog orchid.

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 honour

and 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.

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 Orchards Of Britain And Ireland,

and here we have the frog orchid.

It's relatively common throughout Britain.

So you can see all the green.

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.

So you're confident that if

Anthony Blunt went to Lebanon it would not

have been to see a frog orchid

Definitely not. No. It was clearly a lie.

Can't be true.

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 travelled to

Beirut at that time WITHOUT having seen Philby,

knowing that they were old friends and with many friends in common.

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?

Not Peter Lunn...

..but Nicholas Elliott.

According to Nicholas, his first words were,

"I thought it might be you, Nicholas."

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 and 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.

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 had "ceased to spy" in 949.

Which they were able to tell the Americans.

Elliott filed a report to London and flew on to Africa,

telling Lunn that Philby was now ready to co-operate

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.

On that basis Peter Lunn made an arrangement to see Philby later,

and went off skiing in the mountains.

WIND HOWLS

THUNDERCLAP

Five days later, a winter storm struck Beirut.

BELLY DANCE MUSIC

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 it turns out that the spare girl there was Eleanor Philby,

waiting for her husband.

The first thought that crossed our minds was that he had

been too heavy with the drink

and therefore he'd just sort of collapsed on the street corner,

and that somebody had taken him to 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 have thought

that something serious had happened.

What had happened was that Kim Philby gone down to the port

with a KGB guide...

and by morning was on a Russian freighter

bound for the Soviet Union FOGHORN BLARES

MARCH PLAYS

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 be handed over to the Russians?

It was just impossible to believe.

He was given an apartment just a few hundred metres

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.

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 of somewhat irregular habits,

"he had gone on a 'lost weekend'."

It was March before the newspapers even mentioned his absence.

We had the papers in bed,

and there was a tiny little bit at the bottom of the Observer

saying, "Our reporter's missing "

I suppose in a way one sort of

half believed he had gone, you know? To Moscow.

I mean, what else was he doing?

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 I thought, "Well, you know he's a hero to the Russians."

Not exactly.

Philby found he was not allowed even to enter KGB headquarters.

Nor did he have any rank in the organisation 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.

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 LAUGHS She scuttled off and we got our visa.

Josephine came fairly 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 learnt 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.

Cos otherwise she could have coped with it better.

CLASSICAL MUSIC BY MAHLER

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 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."

And that did not go down well!

And probably he might have said that to all of us too.

That's the way he thought.

Nicholas Elliott's brief trip to Beirut had turned decidedly 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,

"we ought to be ashamed of ourselves letting him go like that,

"we should have roped him in a lot earlier

"and put him in prison where he belongs."

But I think an awful lot of people,

certainly I thought, "Well, thank God he's buggered off.

"We shan't be troubled with him again."

But 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.

It could be just incompetence. Never underrate that possibility.

HE LAUGHS

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.

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 open,

and when the recording was played back...

TRAFFIC NOISES

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

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 skilfully crafted,

and the view was that this was not a spontaneous reaction to

an offer of immunity, that it

had been built up over a long period,

that a lot of thought and planning had gone into it.

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.

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.

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 the 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 mould.

SIRENS WAIL

MUSIC: "Sing Something Simple Theme" by the Cliff Adams Singers

The "Philby mould" 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.

REPORTER: Blake was completely missing.

There was a search immediately with police dogs.

Prison officers examined the wall and found a nylon ladder.

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.

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.

To tell you frankly, Rufina is a very charming, very beautiful

and very clever woman, who, by the way, knew English quite...

quite well to be a wife.

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 PG Wodehouse...

..the complete collection it looks.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS ON RADIO

The radio was his lifeline,

as he settled into the routines of a domestic life.

ON RADIO: This is London calling ..

But one thing didn't change much.

His children told me he missed kippers, marmalade,

English mustard and good whisky.

# We'll sing the old songs like you used to do... #

Rufina told me how he hated her leaving his sight.

Even to go and see friends for the 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...

of freedom.

REPORTER: Solzhenitsyn spent much of his first day in banishment

besieged 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 am responsible too."

So, he was disillusioned, of course.

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'd 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?"

And I said, "We've been here six months

"and we're having a very difficult time."

He said "Six months? "I've been here..."

Well, I think it was 16 years.

EXPLOSIONS

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.

He is here with Marcus Wolf, from Germany.

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.

Nevertheless, it was 14 years before the KGB allowed that icon

even to visit the secret centre of their Foreign Intelligence Service.

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.

That he'd been to many, many intelligence services in the world...

But for the first time he got to his own!

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 about 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 talking about the matter any more.

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 195 .

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.

It's not surprising that 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.

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.

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!

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 to say, "Some material is never going to be disclosed."

FUNERAL MARCH PLAYS

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 in sort of in a pew, as it were, and all the 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 know, it was...

SHE SHIVERS AND LAUGHS

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 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.

GUNSHOT

He still divides opinion.

Does his hatred of fascism in the '30s excuse the betrayal

of his countrymen, or lessen the blame for deaths he may have caused?

He was a British citizen, and he betrayed British secrets.

However marvellous he thought the reason was,

it still doesn't excuse them in the law.

So he was, by proper definition, a traitor.

There's no other way of describing him.

I think he was almost 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 "

I ended up at the place where he's buried,

crammed in among soldiers and patriots.

They all have their titles and their uniforms,

and they seem to have flowers on Memorial Day.

But when you get to Kim Philby's, it does have flowers,

if a little tired.

But no title, no description, just his name.

Well, he was just Dad.

In a way, he's always been just my father.

We all loved him enormously.

What is the question you never asked him and wished you had?

I don't think, I couldn't actually say...

You know, "Why did you do it?"

MUSIC: "The Great Pretender" by The Platters

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd