Kim Philby Read online

  There was a road of sorts eastwards from there to the Yugoslav frontier, a distance of some fifty miles. We managed to get a lift on a truck nearly full of merchandise; the small remaining space held six Albanians, two gundogs and ourselves. The journey, with many stops and minor breakdowns, took ten hours, and it was getting dark when they dropped us a mile or two from the frontier. Knowing that it would be closed and the guards liable to shoot on sight, we had to call out continuously as we walked, ‘Granica! Granica!’ (It was the Serbian word for frontier, but we hoped it would do.) At last torches flashed on us from an Albanian frontier post, where, after identification, the commandant gave us a fine welcome. Soldiers were turned out of a small room and put in with the goats, straw palliasses and a meal provided, money refused. In the morning we crossed into Yugoslavia and walked down to Ohrid, at the head of the beautiful lake of that name. Here we spent three relaxing days. The insects still bit, but we took encouragement from a theory – probably false – that malarious mosquitoes were not found above 1,000 feet.

  Things had changed somewhat from our previous journey. Kim was now even more of an ascetic, more serious without being pompous, determined not to make the slightest concession to tourism or even normal comfort. Wherever we went we automatically sought out the cheapest place to sleep; by train we always went third or ‘hard’ class, and would have gone fourth if it had existed (as it did in Bosnia, where Kim the previous year had travelled around in what amounted to cattle trucks). But he was as interesting a companion as ever. As usual he had taken the trouble to read up the history of the area. This knowledge was all the more valuable because we had no guidebooks (a French Guide Bleu to Yugoslavia was published later). So I came to know something of the conflict of Turk and Serb over the centuries, a subject we found more interesting than the sterile contemporary politics of Yugoslavia. But most of our thoughts, energies and discussions were devoted to the simple business of living: finding somewhere to sleep, food to eat, good water to drink, getting from one place to another. Alcohol we drank sparingly in the Balkans: occasional beer when we could find it, a little local wine, the odd slivovitz. The whole trip, like the other two, was completely sexless. Asceticism was not the only reason for all this. We had little money – I was living entirely on my Oxford scholarship income, and Kim was certainly not well off. I kept careful accounts in a tiny notebook. It may all sound very joyless, but in truth it was a very full and satisfying time: to this day I can reconstruct practically the entire journey from memory. The greatest deprivation I suffered from was the absence of English newspapers.

  For language we relied very largely on Kim’s Serbo-Croat, which was more than adequate for the minor traffic of life. I managed to learn a few of the essentials myself. Ima li voda ovde? Is there water here? Imate li grozhdje/hleb/sobu? Have you grapes/ bread/a room? Gde je nuzhnik? Where is the loo? (This last question was usually unnecessary. The nuzhnik, if indoors, was a noisome little den that proclaimed itself at a distance; if outdoors it was a sort of solitary sentry box, easily identified.) Very frequently, when we arrived in a village, the local ‘English speaker’ would be trotted out. This invariably proved to be someone no longer young who had emigrated to America in about 1910 and had returned some time after the war, leaving behind him most of the English he had acquired. We got used to being greeted in friendly but ancient American slang – ‘Hi, you son-of-a-bitch.’ Kim’s Serbo-Croat was really much more useful: he was able to make conversation.

  The ‘hotels’ of the Balkans at that time were not those of today. Their names were in the highest traditions – Ritz, Bristol, Carlton – but they were, frankly, hovels. I think one or two had enough electricity for the occasional light bulb, but most did not. There would be nothing like running water, and the so-called lavatories were too awful to describe. The beds were not too bad, although one was not always sure of the last occupant. But the food was surprisingly good, though perhaps more because of our hunger than anything else. I do not recall any bathrooms – indeed, I doubt whether I had a bath throughout the journey, certainly not after leaving Germany.

  Primitive and lacking in amenities though the Balkans were, they were a friendly enough place. We never had any fears for our safety or that of our few possessions. Except for Dubrovnik and Kotor there was virtually no tourist trade in any of the places we visited. Often we were assumed at first to be Germans – I expect many people had never seen an Englishman before. Once or twice we were taken for brothers: there may have been a slight physical resemblance at that time, but it probably appeared more pronounced to people unused to English faces. We were thrown together so much for these few weeks, with so little company and so few other diversions, that we might have become seriously irritated with one another; but personal relations held up well, though I do remember one occasion when for reasons now forgotten we strode along for several miles, one slightly ahead of the other, not on speaking terms; each with his own cloud of flies and thoughts.

  While in Albania we had had to abandon hope of getting Bulgarian visas and had settled instead for a short foray into northern Greece. The Greek legation in Tirana gave us visas on the spot (unusual in the Balkans in those days). Our plan was to walk the forty-odd miles from Ohrid through Resan to Bitolj, in the very south of Yugoslavia, whence we could get a train into Greece. The road was not well provided with villages and we had done some twenty-seven miles before we found what appeared to be an inn, but turned out to be a brothel. Refreshed by a beer, and repelling all advances, we pushed on and even entertained thoughts of reaching Bitolj that night. This would have been overdoing things. We had been humping our rucksacks all day over rough roads and hill tracks, with the temperature in the nineties, and it was getting late. Fortunately after a couple of miles, and tiring rapidly, we found somewhere to stay. We made Bitolj the next morning, after three more hours of walking.

  Two days later we were on our way by train to a village called Arnissa in Greek and Ostrovo in Macedonian, about halfway along the railway to Salonica. We had chosen it from the map because of its situation on a large lake, under the great massif of Mount Kaimakchalan. The scenery turned out to be as good as we had hoped, but I doubt if Arnissa had ever had much in the way of visitors before (it is now said to be an up-and-coming summer resort). There was not even what passed in those parts for an inn. Nor were there any roads; to get down to the lake, we had to walk along the railway line. At the little station restaurant we came across a peasant who offered us a room in his house. There we stayed four nights, paying the equivalent of about three (old) pence a night each. The room did not actually have any beds but there were two hard wooden chests covered with quilts of a sort. We slept on these, although I suppose we might have been just as comfortable on the floor. The lavatory was magnificent in its architectural simplicity. A small part of the first floor which jutted out beyond the ground floor was screened off; two floorboards had been prised apart so as to leave a small triangular hole, through which one could see the sunlit ground below. That was all. For meals we ate excellently at the station restaurant. The local population was Slavonic, speaking Macedonian – a mixture of Serb and Bulgarian, close enough to Serb for our purposes – but there were a number of Greek soldiers with whom we talked mainly in French. It was a confusing area linguistically. The Greek for ‘yes’ and the Macedonian word for ‘no’ were both pronounced ‘nay’. Heads were nodded upwards for ‘no’ and from side to side for ‘yes’, again misleading for an Englishman. It was very easy to find yourself misdirected. There was nothing to do but sit peacefully by the lake, bathe in its medicinal-tasting waters, read Plato and Thucydides, eat at the restaurant and talk to the villagers and soldiers. My total expenditure in the four days was six shillings.

  We took the train back to Bitolj. From now on we would do no further walking as a means of transport, but would make our way slowly up to Belgrade by rail. The first day took us from Bitolj to Skopje, or Skoplje as it was then spelt. Though only 120 miles, the journe
y took fully twelve hours. At that time a stretch of eighty miles lay over a superb narrow-gauge mountain railway, the kind which has a turning radius of about a hundred yards; one could – and did – get out of the train on one of those 180-degree turns, cut across a field and jump in on the other side. It was intensely hot. We ate grapes and bread and sweated. On the other side of the little wooden carriage a woman was coughing blood on the floor.

  But we were about to rejoin civilisation, in a sense. Through Veles ran a main line connecting Salonica, Skopje and Belgrade. So from Veles to Skopje we enjoyed the experience of travelling at speed – perhaps forty miles an hour. A tremendous thunderstorm cooled the air and turned all to mud.

  At Skopje my inside decided to rebel for the first time against its unaccustomed dietary and physical regime. The last straw was a meal consisting of a whole melon and a glass of sour cream. Balkan peasants are supposed to live to 120 on this kind of diet, but I lay on the bed feeling terrible, while Kim, who seldom suffered from internal upsets, gaily called attention to what was happening in the street below. Only when a performing bear walked past did I manage to drag myself to the window. Next day things were better and we explored the town. Much of the attraction of Yugoslavia lay in the Turkish legacy – the mosques, the buildings, the little eating places where many varieties of food were kept hot in tureens displayed in the window. There were still a number of older people of Turkish descent to be seen, gravely courteous, writing Turkish in the Arabic script, which was now forbidden in Turkey itself. By comparison the Serbs seemed brash and unpolished.

  We continued our way to Belgrade by slow stages. The last leg was by night train, so full that we had to stand on the open platform between the coaches, where we choked every time we went through a tunnel. Arriving sleepless at 5 a.m., we had to tramp the streets for an hour before we found somewhere cheap enough.

  By now I was beginning to feel the need for home comforts and company, and decided it was time to head for London. Kim preferred to visit Belgrade yet again before returning home. Before he did so, he probably made a side trip down the Danube to the Iron Gates, about a hundred miles east of Belgrade: he claims in his book to have gone there before the war, and this seems the most likely occasion. For my part, after travelling thirty-two hours hard class, I broke the journey at Frankfurt. Not to be outdone by Kim I searched for some time before I found a cheap enough bed, to discover in the small hours that I was sharing it with at least a dozen bedbugs. Next day, having no German money left, and not wishing to draw more from a bank, I visited the British consulate, outside their official opening hours, to ask if they would kindly give me a mark in exchange for a shilling. The consul justifiably regarded me with loathing, thrust a mark angrily into my hand and told me to beat it. Kim and I at this time seem to have expected an unusual range of services from His Majesty’s consular representatives. Finally, after a day in Rotterdam, I came back to the family flat in the Old Brompton Road. The first thing I did was to have a bath; the second, immediately after, was to have another.

  Kim still had a year to go at Cambridge. This was because after managing only a third in Part I of the history tripos he had switched to economics. (In this subject he was eventually to achieve a II:I, which – since firsts in economics were rarely awarded – was probably equivalent to a first in most other subjects.) I never had anything to do with his Cambridge life, nor he with mine at Oxford. Of his friends at Cambridge, to the best of my memory, I met only Michael Stewart, (briefly) John Midgley, mentioned below, and later Guy Burgess. I saw Kim once at Cambridge, when I was on a visit to other Westminster friends. He came once to Oxford, in the autumn of 1932, and we lunched with Maurice Bowra at Wadham. It was a long way from the Adriatic; others were present, the conversation was rather portentous, no one sparkled.

  At Cambridge Kim seems to have had few relaxations. He did not play games or take part in social life. But his time must have been fully occupied by his work and by his very deep involvement in the University Socialist Society. I did not hear much about his Cambridge political activities, now well documented, but it was clear enough then, and is even clearer now, that there was nothing secret about them. I recall his mentioning that he had even begun making political speeches, in spite of his stammer. I saw him little if at all in the Christmas vacation of 1932–33 because he had gone to stay in Nottingham as part of his political education.

  In January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Kim suggested we should go to Berlin in the Easter vacation and see what was happening. I had vague ideas at the time of trying to get into journalism after I had finished at Oxford, and agreed at once. So it was that we arrived in Berlin on 21 March, der Tag von Potsdam.† A huge torchlight street parade was held that evening, ostensibly in celebration of the reopening of the Reichstag in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, but primarily it was a Nazi propaganda exercise. We watched from a balcony in the Potsdamer Straße, where we had taken a room. Somebody in the next house was feeding out a roll of toilet paper high above the heads of the marching storm troopers. It was hard to say whether this represented enthusiasm, crude German humour or, as I hoped, disrespect.

  We were staying in the house where Kim had stayed on his previous visit in July. It was not a left-wing place, rather the opposite. One of the tenants was a storm trooper, and he and we used to meet in the landlady’s room to argue politics. Kim and I were quite open about our anti-Nazism – or rather Kim was, since my German was not good enough to sustain a discussion. As far as I remember he argued that Nazism was not a revolutionary movement, but merely a reactionary means of preserving capitalism against the advance of socialism; and that the form it was taking in Germany was likely to lead to war. We made fun in a small way about the military exercises the storm trooper took part in at weekends in the nearby countryside; small, middle aged, slightly pot bellied, he was an unimpressive physical specimen of Aryan manhood. On his side he would riposte strongly but good-humouredly – he was really quite a nice little man – while the landlady, who had a soft spot for Kim, would listen nervously in case anyone overheard. The Gleichschaltung† of Germany into totalitarianism was by no means complete at this time. Kim, who had brought one or two Marxist books with him, added to these by buying a twelve-volume set of Lenin, in German, from a street barrow. As he pointed out, this was the time and place to buy that sort of book cheap. But outwardly Berlin was now a sea of Nazi flags and anti-Jewish notices: even Wedding, formerly a communist district, was no exception.

  Kim’s politics had developed a good deal in the six months since our Balkan trip. It was not so much a shift of view as a wider knowledge of and especially a greater interest in Marxism. I am said to have described him at this time as a communist,4 and I probably did, for want of a better label, though I am not sure precisely what, at the age of twenty, I would have meant by ‘communist’. If it meant someone who slavishly accepted an imposed party line – or sudden change of line – then, I would have said, that could not be Kim. I always thought of him as the most independent-minded person I had ever met. Talking to him, I realised that most of my views were received views; Kim seemed to have thought out all of his for himself. But at the time he must have seen in Marx a golden key to the interpretation of history and of political and economic struggle. He admired Lenin as a practical revolutionary who had simultaneously put it all down in writing. But he did not seem greatly interested in Russia; the Communist Party of Germany, which had been capable of polling several million votes in a general election, had been of much more concern to him. The German Communists had been unable to prevent Hitler’s advance and were now in eclipse. Possibly this helped to turn Kim, always a believer in the realities of power, away from international communism and towards the Soviet Union as the mainspring of resistance to fascism.

  Our three weeks in Berlin were very different from our previous trips abroad. Each of us had brought work and spent a good part of the day on this. Sometimes we went out together but often each would wan
der off on his own. One day Kim ran into a Cambridge acquaintance, John Midgley, whom we met thereafter once or twice. I think he was with us when we attended a political rally which has been mentioned in one or two books or articles on Kim. It has been said that when the Nazi salute was given Kim heroically braved hostility by refusing to raise his arm. It is true that we didn’t salute; but heroism was unnecessary since those standing near us either realised we were foreign or were not the kind to make a fuss. At the same time, it is also likely that we would have gone to some lengths to avoid giving the salute or saying ‘Heil Hitler’.

  To return to the question I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, did these three journeys involve any direct or indirect contact between Kim and the Soviet intelligence service? Alternatively, was he brought to their notice as a result of them? I cannot of course speak for those periods when I was not in his company, for instance immediately before and after the 1932 journey, or during his Berlin side trip, or for that matter the many occasions on our Berlin visit of 1933 when we were separated. All I can vouch for is that while we were together nothing happened to suggest even remotely to me a Soviet or other clandestine contact, presence or interest, direct or indirect.

  In June 1933 Kim came down from Cambridge for good. I think he must have gone off to Vienna almost immediately (in his book he says that his underground work began in central Europe in June 1933), and I doubt if I saw him before he left. According to Elizabeth Monroe,5 Kim’s stated intention was to improve his German with a view to getting into the Foreign Service. He seems not to have publicised this intention very widely: I myself had a hazy but erroneous impression that he was doing a postgraduate year at Vienna University. (His German was already good; if he had been thinking only of the Foreign Service it would have made much more sense to go to France for a year. Good French was more or less obligatory.) Perhaps his chief reason for going to Austria was to get into the thick of European politics. If so, he chose well: the winter of 1933–34 saw Viennese socialism crushed by Chancellor Dollfuss, and the huge socialist-built blocks of workers’ flats blasted by government artillery. Kim, as is now known, threw himself into the task of aiding left-wingers in danger from the police, including refugees from Nazi Germany, and helping to organise assistance and escape.