Original subtitles

(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.