National Post (National Edition)
HOW THE COLD WAR’S GREATEST SPY DROVE THE ERA’S TWO GREATEST SPY NOVELISTS APART.
KIM PHILBY INSPIRED THE COLD WAR’S TWO GREATEST THRILLER WRITERS — THEN HE DROVE THEM APART
In early 1968 Graham Greene and John le Carré came into a very public dispute. It was an unexpected falling out; Greene had admired The Spy Who Came in from the Cold when it was published five years previously, so much so that he had written to Victor Gollancz, le Carré’s publisher, trying to find out who was behind the pseudonym. Once David Cornwell’s authorship had been established, Greene sought to poach him for the Bodley Head, the publisher he represented.
For le Carré, Greene was a profound influence, the novelist whose books were a guide as he emerged from a career in MI5 and SIS to become a writer. The pair had spent a boozy evening together in Vienna a couple of years previously, and there were signs of an emerging friendship despite the 27 years between them.
Then came the falling out. The reason was Kim Philby. The great espionage novelists of the Cold War had been driven apart by the conflict’s most brilliant spy.
Since defecting to the Soviet Union in 1963, Philby had been a source of national fascination, and news from Moscow that he was about to publish a memoir only intensified that interest. As a result, the investigative journalists of the Sunday Times’ Insight team published Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, which included revelations about just how important a figure he had been at SIS. Le Carré contributed the foreword, in which he dissected Philby’s character, arguing that rather than being driven by communist ideology, he was motivated by
betrayal itself, a means of wreaking revenge on the British establishment in which he had been raised.
“Through his father, and the education which his father gave him,” le Carré wrote, “he experienced both as victim and as a practitioner the capacity of the British ruling class for betrayal and polite self-preservation.” Philby’s boorish, domineering father, an imperial official who came to loathe his home country, was hard on his son, at one point sending him to live with the Bedouin to toughen him up. Philby attended Westminster School and then Cambridge, where leftwing radicalism gave vent to his anger and alienation.
Le Carré wrote that he saw something of himself in Philby — his father was similarly oppressive — and speculated that under slightly different circumstances, he might have been tempted by the same traitorous path. Philby was, le Carré wrote, one of his “secret sharers.” Yet this fascination with his subject should not be confused with indulgence: Philby, he wrote, was “vain, spiteful and murderous.”
Greene, who had known Philby well, bridled at the essay and, in reviewing the book for The Observer, wondered how the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold could have been responsible for such a “vulgar and untrue” depiction of the man. Greene poked fun at le Carré’s theory and, for good measure, likened him to E. Phillips Oppenheim, a prolific author of altogether more lowbrow thrillers.
What Greene did not reveal was that he had recently resumed his friendship with Philby. Two years earlier, a Soviet court had sentenced dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel to hard labour camps for smuggling their work out to the West and Greene wrote an open letter to the Kremlin demanding all his Russian royalties be given to the wives of the imprisoned writers, vowing never to return to the country unless Russian writers were given freedom of expression. Philby read the letter and, anxious about the Stalinist turn under Brezhnev, dashed off a letter of support to Greene, in which he expressed the hope that one day they might meet again as friends.
The pair began to correspond and when Philby decided to publish his memoir, My Silent War, in 1968 (although with the permission of the KGB of course), Greene contributed the foreword. While he noted “the sharp touch of the icicle in the heart,” in the way Philby treated those he had betrayed, Greene nevertheless found the book to be both a gripping thriller and a “dignified statement of his beliefs and motives.” When Philby read the foreword, he pronounced himself “flabbergasted.” “He understood what I had done and why I had done it,” Philby said. But then it should not have been that surprising: they went way back.
Philby knew he was going to like Greene when he read about his idea for a spy-brothel. During the first years of the Second World War, Philby ran the section of SIS responsible for Portugal, Spain and West Africa. Of the memos that came across his desk, Greene’s were always the most entertaining. The brothel plan involved setting up an establishment in Bissau, in Portuguese Guinea, where Vichy French officers took their holidays. The hope was that these unwitting officers would give up information about Axis shipping operations in their pillow talk. “For kicks, I put the plan to my superiors,” Philby later wrote, “and we discussed it seriously before rejecting it as unlikely to be what is now called cost-effective.”
Greene, who was stationed in Freetown, invented many other schemes, most of which proved impractical. He was not much of a field agent. However, he was much more effective once he was recalled to England to work directly under Philby. Absorbing much of their focus was Lisbon. As Portugal was ostensibly neutral, it was one of the few places in which one could travel between Allied and Axis territory and for this reason it was a nest of spies.
Working out of a country house in St. Albans, Philby marshalled his group of dedicated amateurs in their counter-intelligence work, their long, intense shifts punctuated by trips to the King Harry pub for a boozy lunch. “No one could have been a better chief than Kim Philby,” Greene wrote. “He worked harder than anyone and never gave the impression of labour.”
Greene was fascinated by the agents who invented their information. There was Juan Pujol Garcia (Garbo) a Spanish anti-fascist who posed as a German spy only to feed the Nazis reports concocted from English guidebooks and newspapers; another case was Czech businessman Paul Fidrmuc (Ostro) who made up reports that he gave to the Abwehr as a lucrative sideline. The novelist in Greene took note; the idea of a spy who invents information to help pay the bills later became the plot of Our Man in Havana.
Greene was part of the intelligence operation that was preparing for D-Day but in May 1944, a month before the invasion, he quit. His departure coincided with Philby’s ruthless pursuit of the job running the Soviet section. Greene later said he disliked Philby’s “cold ambition” and that he did not want to be part of his “machinations.” Did Greene, with his extraordinarily perceptive eye, detect something more sinister in Philby’s actions? Rumours of a mole in British intelligence started doing the rounds at this time. Greene later denied knowing anything about Philby’s spying, saying that, had he realized, he would have given his drinking partner 24 hours head start before reporting him.
In January 1963, le Carre was summoned to the office of his Station Chief in Bonn and informed of Philby’s defection. It was the latest and most devastating blow to British intelligence. In 1951, as an officer in the Intelligence Corps stationed in Graz, he had been shown photos of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean as the intelligence services went on a manhunt for the diplomats (Philby had tipped off Maclean that the CIA and MI5 were on to him). On the day le Carre was formally initiated into SIS, he was told that one of their own, George Blake, had been exposed as a Soviet spy, having blown the cover of hundreds of British agents. Blake confessed and was sent to prison in 1961.
The idea of trying to rescue blown networks behind enemy lines became the premise of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the novel he started writing while working for SIS in West Germany. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, le Carre was sent to the city to support the local station and found in the concrete and barbed wire barrier a symbol for the perversity and futility of the Cold War. “Staring at the Wall was like staring at frustration itself,” he wrote, “and it touched an anger in me that found its way into the book.”
When The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a bestseller, le Carre left the service to write full time. He was not done reckoning with Philby, however. The foreword le Carre wrote in 1968 was not only an exercise in trying to understand Philby, it was also the first draft of a new fiction. Using what he called “Philby’s murky lamp” to light his path, le Carre travelled deep into the mindset of the traitor, trying to tease out motivations beyond ideology. The result was Bill Haydon, the mole in the Circus, and the villain at the heart of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The animosity between Greene and le Carre did not last. In 1974, shortly after finishing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carre travelled to Cambodia and Vietnam, feeling that he had depleted his reservoir of material and needed to go to the front lines of the Cold War to refresh himself as a writer (his experiences found their way into The Honourable Schoolboy). While in south-east Asia he reread The Quiet American and wrote to Greene to tell him how the novel had lost none of its freshness. He hoped, also, that their “passage of arms over Philby” had not soured their relations for good. Greene wrote a gracious letter in return, assuring him that there were no hard feelings.
There was, though, a postscript to the pair’s relations with Philby. Following the first wave of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the mid1980s, Greene returned to the Soviet Union. He visited Philby at his Moscow flat, where they drank vodka and reminisced about old times. As Greene was leaving, Philby’s wife, Rufina, told him that her husband was “burdened by doubt.” For Greene, doubt was a condition of his Catholic faith, a subject that he had explored in many of his novels, all of which sat, well read, on Philby’s bookshelves.
Le Carre’s novels were on those shelves too. Despite what le Carre had written about him, Philby enjoyed the adventures of George Smiley, even if he found the plots too complex to be plausible. In 1987, with glasnost accelerating, it was le Carre’s turn to visit Moscow. At a meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers held in his honour, an intermediary asked him if he wanted to meet Philby. Feeling a “spurt of hatred” at the request, le Carre turned it down (although he later admitted he regretted not meeting him, if only out of curiosity). He did not know that Philby had less than a year left to live.
“I now have it on pretty good authority that Philby knew he was dying and was hoping I would collaborate with him on his second volume of memoirs,” he wrote in 2016. Was this a last attempt to grapple with those doubts? To tell the truth without the KGB breathing down his neck? That is one Cold War thriller that remains tantalizingly unwritten.
Excerpted from Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.
The Daily Telegraph