The Charmed Life of a Traitor

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, My Paper Chase, Harold Evans recounts how The Sunday Times unmasked Kim Philby, the most notorious spy of the Cold War.

The smooth, well-dressed British “minor” civil servant Kim Philby is known now as the most notorious spy of modern times. But he wasn’t unmasked for what he was until The Sunday Times of London penetrated the official secrecy and old boys’ network that had for years covered up his treachery and his crimes. What follows is an abridged extract from the autobiography of The Sunday Times editor, Harold Evans’ My Paper Chase, published this week by Little, Brown. [Harry Evans is married to Daily Beast founder and Editor-in-chief Tina Brown.]

Immediately when we started asking questions in 1967 we were warned off. We found it odd that senior officials who told us Philby was of no importance were alarmed when we persisted. I was told, “You must stop your inquiries. There is the most monstrous danger here. You will be helping the enemy.” With every door slammed in our face, and the ever-present threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, we had to engage in a frustratingly tedious process of assembling, assessing, and verifying tiny scraps of information from hundreds of interviews with denizens of a closed world whose stock-in-trade is deceit. We learned that he’d been a crack shot, regarded as the James Bond in the SOE operations of subverting the Nazis in occupied France. But of his other secret work we for quite a time learned nothing.

This meant not only that any intelligence operations against the Soviets were doomed from the start but that the days of all the MI6 agents already in place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were numbered.

Most of the ink over the years had been spent not on Philby but on the mysteries of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two British diplomats in Washington. They suddenly vanished in 1951 and were not heard of again until 1956 when they turned up in Moscow. There was speculation that a “third man” had tipped off Burgess and Maclean to flee before they were brought in for interrogation and that he might be their friend, another diplomat in Washington with them, Kim Philby.

Four years later in October 1955, a Labour MP asked in Parliament whether Philby was “the third man.” The Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan (later Prime Minister) declared: “I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country or to identify him with the so-called third man, if indeed there was one.” A suave Philby, speaking with a slight stutter, disdained the accusation at a press conference he called in his mother’s London home. The press, too, duly exonerated Philby. This was the period when there was revulsion in Britain for the witch hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy. Challenged to substantiate his accusation, the MP had to withdraw, shouted down by his fellow Labour MPs.

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times. By Harold Evans. 592 pages. Little, Brown. $27.99. By this time, Philby seemed to have retired from diplomatic service. He had ostensibly taken a job with a trading firm, then in 1956 he went to Beirut as a correspondent of the Economist and the Observer, the prestigious Sunday newspaper. What nobody knew at the time was the job had been fixed for him by his former colleagues in MI6, the British intelligence service. He traveled throughout the Middle East as a journalist—and fairly soon deprived Sam Pope Brewer, The New York Times correspondent, of his wife Eleanor. Seven years later, in 1963, on the way to a party with Eleanor, he got out of a taxi “to send a cable”—and vanished. Reports that he was in Moscow could not be confirmed. There was never anything about him in the Soviet press; if he was in Moscow, he had no address, no telephone number and in the city if he was glimpsed one minute, he was gone the next.

Few of the people in MI6 or MI5, the counterintelligence service, would divulge anything at all. “Sorry. Official Secrets.” And click. It was maddening. A retired MI5 officer said, “Of course you have only to look in the files to see it all.” Yes? And what did you learn? “Better leave it at that, old boy. Don’t want to get trouble with the OSA (Official Secrets Act).”

After many months of frustration, Phil Knightley, a key member of the Insight team on Philby, who bore a marked resemblance to Lenin, went again through our collection of espionage books. There was a slight one titled British Agent, written by someone named John Whitwell. There was no such person. Knightley winkled out that it was a cover name for A. L. (Leslie) Nicholson, who’d been our man in Prague and later in Riga. Knightley found him to be a drunken burnout living on a miserable pension over a seedy café in East London. It was hard to believe he had ever been an MI6 officer. Another wasted expense, thought Knightley as he treated Nicholson to a good Italian lunch and several brandies. But as Knightley gently pressed questions, inevitably revealing that we knew Philby was important and by inference that we didn’t quite know why, Nicholson’s enjoyment increased. He was aware of the seriousness of his illness (he died two years later from cancer), and over coffee and another brandy he told Knightley what Philby had really done. “The reason for the flap, old man,” he said, “is that Kim was head of our anti-Soviet section.”

As Knightley put it, “I can remember trying to clear my head of brandy fumes.” He pressed Nicholson. “Let me get this straight. The man running our secret operations against the Russians after 1944 was a Russian agent himself?”