III THE AFTERLIFE
There were many fictions told, in the years that followed Burgess and Maclean’s defection, and then Kim Philby’s. The first horse out of the gate was Philby’s own My Silent War, ghostwritten by KGB, which settled more than a few old scores. James Angleton, the CIA’s spyhunter at the Office of Security, must have squirmed a little, when he read Philby’s descriptions of their long, liquid lunches in the bar at the Willard. Philby had a hollow leg, famously, and could drink most men under the table. But each of the affected services had their own axe to grind, and each of them contributed to the narrative in their own way, turning it to specific advantage.
The most persistent myth is that the three men were desperately unhappy in exile, that Soviet daily life was a bitter disappointment, and that they came to later regret their life choices. This is projection, one of those fitting ironies, that the traitors made their bed, and had to lie in it. Nothing is ever quite so neat. Life is untidy, yes, and most of us would take a do-over of something, from some stage in our previous lives, but reverse engineering the fairytale ending is wishful thinking. Burgess, it’s true, paints a sad figure in later days, pickled in drink, cruising for rentboys, pestering the occasional English tourist for news of home – this last reinforced by Coral Browne’s fascinating account of Guy slipping into her dressing room, backstage at a Moscow production of Hamlet – but we suspect he would have wound up the same pathetic has-been if he’d stayed behind. He was always the bridesmaid, never a bride, his theatrics a cry for attention. Poor old Guy, lays it on a little thick, you know. He would have hated it, being a bore, the last one at the party, who doesn’t know when to leave.
Maclean’s experience was very different. He learned Russian, and taught English as a foreign language. He lectured on economics, and wrote about international relations. He survived Burgess by twenty years. (His marriage collapsed, but that was because Melinda slept with Philby.) Maclean, clearly the least colorful, is now considered to have done the most damage, of any of the Cambridge Five. The hard information he gave up to the Russians, about nuclear policy, about NATO, was solid gold. For all the drama, and there was plenty of it, Maclean seems to have best weathered the storm. Maybe, once he’d escaped the stresses of his double life, and committed to a future behind the Iron Curtain, he found stability.
Philby was never going to be content. Geography wasn’t the issue. His only compass was inconstancy, whether it was other men’s wives or his own, his personal loyalties or his country. He was hard-wired to be unfaithful. His treason was where he felt most at home, living a pretense. The boy who fell between two stools, and proved to be neither fish nor fowl, but wore whichever uniform matched the color of his camouflage, a man without character. He said in an interview that the only things he missed about England were Colman’s and Worcestershire, but he still read The Times, listened to the Beeb, and followed cricket scores. He was haunted by disillusion, it was said, but what illusions had he ever claimed for his own, except self-regard?
Aside from the official fictions, Philby’s memoirs, or Yuri Modin’s, there have been many, many after-action reports, some by insiders, some by friendly outsiders given insider access, some by hostile theologies. You can read between the lines, and depending on whose ox is being gored, make a judgment call. With all the clamor, it’s not always easy, and in some respects, you’ll learn as much or more from purely speculative fiction, spy stories that hang a suit of clothes in an empty closet.
There have been almost as many novels and screenplays written about Philby and the Cambridge Five as there have been memoirs and Cold War history. Partly, this is our fascination with spycraft, but the novelist can also imagine an inner life for their characters, the spy and the spycatcher, and light them from within.
Le Carré published Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in 1974, ten years after Philby fled Beirut for Moscow, but the dust wasn’t entirely settled. Anthony Blunt, for example, had quietly left the Queen’s service, but he wouldn’t be publicly exposed for another five years; MI5 kept the identity of John Cairncross, the so-called Fifth Man, a secret until the defection of KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky.
Tinker, Tailor uses the bones of Philby’s story, the Soviet agent-in-place, his position cultivated over many years, and more to the point, the reason he avoids the least suspicion for so long: he’s to the manor born – the English ruling classes can’t imagine one of their own a traitor. The ‘mole,’ a term for sleeper agent le Carré himself invented, also insulates himself (spoiler alert) by climbing into bed with the wife of the man most likely to uncover him, which disables effective pursuit. The dynamic of Tinker, Tailor is internal, not the existential defined by action, like Ian Fleming and Bond, but the existential defined by doubt, the ground shifting underneath your feet. It’s a story told reluctantly, between long silences.
In an odd echo of Coral Browne’s brush pass with Burgess, le Carré was offered a meeting with Philby, in Moscow, the year before Philby died. In 1987, le Carré wanted to research a book - The Russia House - and his visit was grudgingly approved. (He was, after all, a former officer of both MI5 and MI6, however celebrated he’d become as a novelist.) When he got there, somebody approached him about a meet with Philby. In the old days, it would have been written off as bait-and-switch, a KGB provocation, but it was apparently legit. Le Carré refused. “A thoroughly bad lot,” he said about it later. “I wouldn’t have trusted him with my cat for the weekend.”