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At the Café Royal in Regent Street in 1944 three intelligence officers bent over their plates while Europe held its breath. Outside, London braced for D-day. Inside, Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6.
Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6’s counterespionage arm, blinked. Educated at Westminster, converted to communism at Cambridge and by then securely installed as Moscow’s man at the heart of the British establishment, he had helped orchestrate the deception on which Operation Overlord depended, persuading Hitler that the allies would land at Calais rather than Normandy. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion. Yet here he was, strolling off-stage before the curtain rose.
Why? Had Greene glimpsed the treachery across the table? Robert Verkaik circles that question in this elegant and forensic double portrait setting Greene, that sociologist of sin, alongside the Kremlin’s golden boy Philby, with the lengthening shadow of the cold war falling between them.
Greene enters already steeped in divided loyalties. At school in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, he felt caught between the authority of his headteacher father and the contempt of his peers. The sense of standing on the wrong side of the line never left him. He flirted with communism, then with Labour, almost never voted, and cultivated a romantic attraction to all manner of causes.
Risk, however, was his real creed. During the blitz, he gravitated to Soho’s seedier haunts, visiting clip joints and compiling a private catalogue of sex workers. When a Luftwaffe bomb flattened his Clapham house, the Reform Club became his bolt-hole, a place in which the cream of British intelligence and more than a few Soviet agents exchanged gossip over claret. From that upholstered limbo, his absorption into MI6 under Philby followed swiftly enough.
Philby’s doubleness was cooler. Born in India and nicknamed after Kipling’s hero because his first words were in Punjabi, he was the son of Englishman St John Philby, who converted to Islam and advised the Saudi king. Verkaik presents him as a scion of “the British ruling class”, which slightly overstates the case. Philby in fact brushed up against the upper echelons without ever quite belonging to them, and an element of class envy at school and university may well have sharpened his taste for revolution. In time he became, thanks to the clubbable incompetence of intelligence vetting, a trusted insider at MI6, eased through by assurances from his father that the communist phase had been a youthful folly.
Verkaik is helped along by the fact that both his subjects make for terrific copy. Greene, forever dramatising his delinquency, wrote to his longsuffering wife that he was by nature “profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life” – that his infidelities were symptoms of a “disease” which happened also to be his material. Cure the malady and the novelist would vanish. Philby, less confessional but no less carnivorous, had four wives and a flotilla of affairs, conducting treason and matrimony with comparable sangfroid.
Part of the pleasure of Verkaik’s book is the vicarious glide through their parallel rake’s progresses. Yet beneath it all lay something darker. Gambling that Stalin would not double cross his western partners, Philby was quietly funnelling operational details, analyses and, most explosively, material related to D-day planning to Moscow. Had the Kremlin decided to do things differently, the beaches of Normandy could have become a slaughterhouse.
Had Greene guessed, as early as 1944, that his boss was playing a double game? Did his abrupt resignation reflect not disillusionment with office politics, but having caught Philby out? Verkaik asks but does not presume to answer. It would take another two decades for MI5 to catch up and for Philby to defect to the Soviet Union in 1963. However lofty the reasons for his defection, the reality turned out to be more mundane: in Moscow, he was reduced to pestering his handlers for English marmalade and the latest cricket scores from home.
