Young Philby by Robert Littell Page A

hand. “No matter.”
    The only thing that had changed about the Friedman woman since our paths had crossed in Vienna was her hair—I remember it being the color of rust then, now it was pearl-gray. I found Litzi Friedman to be a moody young woman who arrived at each meeting with her hair dyed a different color. She confessed to being bored to tears by the British and their class distinctions. I concluded that she was eager to be of service to the internationale but erratic in her behavior (she was quite capable of squandering the little money her husband earned on footwear) and, if I am any judge, immature in her Marxist indoctrination. Oh, she was familiar enough with the general argument: dialectical materialism, the class struggle as the motor of social change, history as a science based on thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But she was inept at analysis that required excavating under the surface of political events. Convincing me how passionately she supported the Soviet Union seemed to be her top priority. As I wrote in the report I filed with Moscow Centre after each of our meetings, I did not consider her to be a potentially important contributor to our cause. This husband of hers, this Harold Adrian Philby, was (to employ the British idiom) a different kettle of fish entirely.
    Friedman’s praise of Philby was ringing in my ears when the note from the Central Committee of the British Communist Party crossed my desk. This same Philby had applied to join the party. With respect to long-term penetration agents, he was made to measure: young, ardent, idealistic, iconoclastic, disgusted with the muck the Great Powers had made of Europe after the Great War, Cambridge educated, socialist oriented, upper-class with (as I came to appreciate) an appropriate amount of guilt at not having honest working-class dirt under his fingernails. He was one of those pampered aristocrats who threw away the cores when they ate apples. In addition he was the son of an eccentric Englishman, Harry St John Philby, who had converted to Islam and gone off to live in Arabia, where he was known to be a confidant of the Saudi monarch, ibn Saud. St John was thought to have the usual old school connections on Fleet Street and perhaps even in Caxton House, the nerve center of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, known also as MI6. As far as the younger Philby was concerned, there was a bonus to be had: Like a great many undergraduates of his day, Philby had belonged to the Cambridge University Socialist Society, attending meetings in the beer vapors of Matthew’s Café, arguing into the early hours whether there was any point in handing out the Daily Worker to dog-tired workers living on the wrong side of the railway bridge in Romsey Town; Philby, who according to Litzi Friedman considered himself a Marxist by the time he left university, had nibbled at the edges of the Cambridge Communist cell when it came into existence, but had by a fortunate twist of fate never actually joined , which meant that his name would be spotless as a newly minted halfpenny for the inevitable background checks his candidacy for a government or Fleet Street job would provoke.
    I asked for, and received by return telegram, permission from Moscow Centre to attempt to recruit Harold Adrian Philby to work for Soviet intelligence. It goes without saying, I gave Litzi Friedman detailed instructions to be sure she and the young Philby were not being followed when she brought him to that first meeting in Regent’s Park. She was to tell him only that he would be seeing someone important. Nothing more. She was to take three different taxis, getting out each time before the hack reached the destination she had given the driver. She was to use one-way streets, walking against traffic, to disrupt any automobile-based surveillance. She was to use Harrods emporium, entering through one door, going up in the lifts, descending by a staircase, exiting into the always teeming Brompton