Once more into the interrogation room

Or, more probing of the Elliott-Philby affair

Confession: I can’t quite let this story go. I love the mysteries opened up by the new documents now available on the interrogation of Kim Philby in 1963 and his defection to Moscow. (If you want more drama, and more fictionalisation, have a look at the UK TV series, A Spy Among Friends, available on Amazon Prime).

So, in the light of the new documents, I went back to Ben Macintyre’s A Spy among Friends (2014) on the Philby-Elliot pas de deux. ^[1] The book doesn’t tell us a lot new about Philby, and is based largely on other journalistic sources (plus Philby’s own tendentious memoir). What Macintyre does is open up the (secret) life of the lesser-known Nicholas Elliott. He provides a gripping account of the decades-long friendship between these two MI6 operatives, which dated from 1940. He makes clear just how convinced Elliott was, until the very end, of Philby’s innocence and the extent to which he protected and advanced Philby’s interests after his fall from grace with the defection of Maclean and Burgess in 1951. What Macintyre doesn’t manage is to explain exactly what changed Elliott’s mind from fierce defender of Kim to bloodhound interrogator, or what he was really after by way of a Philby confession.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of Macintyre’s account is that he can’t quite figure out how to draw down the curtain on the story. Was Elliott duped by Philby and thereby allowed him to escape? Or did he have some fiendish and private plan to encourage Philby to flee to Moscow? At one point, Macintyre says that Elliott’s decision to leave Beirut without securing a full confession from Philby and his alleged failure to put Kim under surveillance was “either monumentally stupid or exceptionally clever.” ^[2] Ten pages later we read, “many in the intelligence world believed that by leaving the door open to Moscow and then walking away, Elliott had deliberately forced Philby into exile. And they may have been right.” ^[3] (277)

I think we can come to a stronger conclusion on the basis of the newly released records of the Elliott interrogation. I said in a previous column that I thought Elliott was “royally played” by Philby.

I still think that. I just don’t think there was a question of monumental stupidity or exceptional cleverness at work. Something else entirely.

The whole Philby interrogation and confession hinges on one thing—that, yes, Philby had spied for the Russians during the war, but broke off his double agentry in 1946. This was the message that Philby wanted to convey, which maximised his options for escaping prosecution, having some kind of life after 1963, and even being able to continue in the service of the KGB. It was also the message that Elliott and MI6 wanted to hear, not least because it limited the damage that Philby’s confession would do to the Anglo-American intelligence relationship. It also softened the blow of Philby’s treachery, because of the role that the Soviet Union came to play after 1941 as a sometimes-ally in the war against the Third Reich. Philby’s treachery could be viewed in some twisted sense as historically acceptable.

But the convenience of the Philby confession for both sides was imperilled by one gigantic problem. This was the question of whether Philby had betrayed the greatest of the post-war intelligence triumphs against the Soviet Union, the code-breaking program called VENONA. Macintyre suggests, without proof, that Philby, when he was serving as MI6’s liaison officer in Washington, was “read in” to the Venona material.^[4] Whether he was fully read in, or just became aware through his contacts with US intelligence officials is not clear. One way or another, it was Venona that uncovered the spying of Donald Maclean and Philby’s knowledge of it tipped him off to the fact that a man he had recruited into the pay of the Russians was about to be apprehended. That would be bad for Soviet intelligence and really bad for Philby.

So what does Philby do when posed this question by Elliott:

“And you presumably told them, of that special material which you knew about when you were in Washington?”

Philby responds with a confession that is actually a deflection.

He says: “Of course. The code name was ISCOT I think.” ^[5]

In the margins of the typescript someone has annotated this with “N.B. There is a misunderstanding here.” That someone appears to have been Elliott. In the second, January 11, interrogation, the fact that Philby had passed ISCOT material to the Russians during the war was again mentioned. Elliott annotated this with a note (“N.B. I have no idea myself what this is.”) ^[6]

Philby was both being truthful and blowing smoke. He was trying to throw them off the scent by not mentioning VENONA and only referring to the MI6 code-name (ISCOT) for a World War Two SIGINT program. That program involved code-breaking of wartime COMINTERN traffic and, as Richard Aldrich relates, was closely held by a small number of MI6 officers and “mostly revealed a dutiful Soviet struggle against their shared enemy, Nazi Germany.” (37-38).^[7] I owe this appreciation of the ISCOT reference to Bill Robinson, Canada’s foremost expert on the history of Canadian signals intelligence, whose blog, Lux ex Umbra, is an invaluable resource. ^[8]

Philby also told Elliott later in the January 9 interrogation that he informed the Soviets about wartime British code-breaking and “also the COMINTERN stuff that we were getting during the war [ISCOT again],” but, more deflection, “on the whole they were not awfully interested.” ^[9] This was contradicted by statement from Philby to Elliott in the second interrogation on January 11, that the Russians “gave him virtually no ‘crits’ at all on his material and expressed virtually no views at all about it.” ^[10]

There was no deeper probe, in the interrogation records now released, of what, if anything, Philby had known about VENONA or what he might have passed to the KGB about it after 1945.

This let Philby off the hook for what might have been his most damaging betrayal; and it let MI6 off the hook in terms of being able to say to the Americans, with some kind of straight face, that Philby had stopped spying for the Russians in 1946.

Where does this leave Elliott? There is no hint of a clever masterplan to enable a Philby escape to Moscow. Elliott remained a true believer in Kim’s veracity and his gentleman’s agreement to tell the (whole) truth, even after the double-cross was revealed. The fact that he didn’t probe on VENONA or anything else to do with Philby’s career as a double-agent after 1946 was neither stupid nor clever. It was, simply, self-serving, a matter of hearing and learning only what you wanted to. It’s not an uncommon sin in the intelligence world, but it was one boosted by Elliott’s own certainty of judgement about his old friend, Kim. It was also helped by the fact that Elliott himself was not well versed in the world of signals intelligence and its greatest hits.

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^[1] Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Penguin Random House; pbk edition McClelland and Stewart, 2015)

^[2] Macintyre, p. 267.

^[3] Macintyre, p. 277

^[4] Macintyre,p. 123; for the VENONA decrypts, go to the National Security Agency website, https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-Transparency-Initiatives/Historical-Releases/Venona/

^[5] UK National Archives, “Conversation No. 2,” January 9, 1963, Philby file, KV2/4737, pp. 141-154, https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/release-2025-01/kv2-4737.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

^[6] UK National Archives, Philby file, “Meeting with Peach at 1600 hours on Friday, 11^th January, 1963, KV2/4737, pp. 155-163, https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/release-2025-01/kv2-4737.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

^[7] Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain’s most secret intelligence agency (Harper Collins, 2019, pp. 37-38.

^[8] https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com

^[9] UK National Archives, “Conversation No. 2,” January 9, 1963, Philby file, KV2/4737, pp. 141-154, https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/release-2025-01/kv2-4737.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

^[10] UK National Archives, Philby file, “Meeting with Peach at 1600 hours on Friday, 11^th January, 1963, KV2/4737, pp. 155-163, https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/release-2025-01/kv2-4737.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email