Free Kim Philby by Tim Milne Page A

several post-mortem discussions with Geoffrey Paterson, the local MI5 representative, and Bobby Mackenzie, the embassy security officer. Kim put forward a theory of how events might have gone. Maclean, he suggested, had discovered he was under suspicion and being followed. But this would make it extremelydifficult for him to attempt any contact with the Russians, without which his chances of escape were greatly reduced. The fortuitous arrival of Burgess offered a way out, because Burgess could make the necessary arrangements through his own Soviet contact. The reason why Burgess also fled, Kim suggested, was because he was near the end of his tether and his Russian friends thought it safest to remove him from the scene. In Washington Kim stuck to this reconstruction of events, and was able to use it to good effect with the FBI. It assumed, of course, that Burgess had been a Soviet agent. Yet three pages and a few days later we find Kim back in London, telling Dick White of MI5 that it was almost inconceivable that anyone as notoriously indiscreet as Burgess could have been a secret agent of any kind, let alone a Soviet agent. If anyone ever taxed him with this inconsistency, he does not mention it.
In conversation with me – or other friends as far as I know – Kim never referred to the ordeal he had been through. Nor did he try to refute, or even mention, the evidence that had been brought against him. Only once did he discuss any part of the matter with me. One evening after he had been having supper with us he began to talk a little about Guy Burgess. Life for Guy, he said, had evidently become absolutely hopeless by 1951, and if he was indeed a Russian spy the strain on him must have been intolerable. Kim went on to say that he had been searching in his memory for any evidence which might point to the truth about Guy, and had remembered one possibly significant thing: during the war Guy had for a time assiduously sought the company of a lady of illustrious family who was working at Bletchley. Conceivably, Kim surmised, Guy had been hoping she would eventually talk indiscreetly to him about her work. Takensomewhat aback, I asked whether he was expecting me to pass this on to the security people. ‘Why yes,’ said Kim in surprise, ‘that’s why I mentioned it.’
The more I thought of it afterwards the more puzzling I found this incident. Two things seemed absolutely obvious. First, if Guy really had been cultivating this lady’s company so busily, the fact was sure by now to be well known. Second, the reason why he had done so was much more likely to be connected with her famous name than with anything else. Guy could never resist a celebrity; as Denis Greenhill put it in a Times article, ‘I have never heard a name-dropper in the same class’. When I mentioned this story in the appropriate quarter it aroused no interest at all, presumably for the reasons I have suggested.
During the winter of 1952–53 we had several other evening visits from Kim at our small flat in Chancery Lane. His export–import job was in the City, not far away, and often he preferred to spend the night at his mother’s flat in Drayton Gardens rather than get back to Rickmansworth. Together we all listened to the American Presidential election results, Kim ardently supporting Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower. Another evening he insisted on cooking us a superb lobster paella, taking everything upon himself from buying and killing the lobster to finally serving up. Once he got very drunk. It so happened that we had been painting the bathroom. Kim lurched in, leant heavily on the window ledge and left a permanent impression of his hand, like the footprints of the famous in the wet cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. If by any chance some later occupant of the first-floor flat at Chancery Lane ever found that the bathroom window ledge still bore faint traces of a hand that is how it came about.
Another of his visits also