‘Castle, ever since he had joined the firm as a young recruit more than thirty years ago, had taken his lunch in a public house behind St. James’s Street, not far from the office. If he had been asked why he lunched here he would have referred to the excellent quality of the sausages; he might have preferred a different bitter from Watneys, but the quality of the sausages outweighed that. He was always prepared to account for his actions, even the most innocent, and he was always strictly on time’.
The first paragraph of The Human Factor by Graham Greene, 1978. (Greene had a thing for sausages. In the mid-1960s he nearly went bankrupt after he was defrauded in a bogus sausage factory scam fronted by Hollywood villain George Sanders.)
Number 14 Ryder Street, off St. James’s St., was where the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section V (prototype for MI6) was based during the later stages of the 2nd World War. Another wartime SIS location was a flat at no. 5 St. James’s St., which was used to brief agents due to be sent into occupied countries. Graham Greene, who worked for SIS during the war, used a description of the flat for The Human Factor, his novel about a Soviet spy in British Intelligence. Greene’s wartime boss was none other than Kim Philby, the most damaging Soviet spy in the history of the Cold War.
Philby and Greene became good friends and they took their lunches together in The King’s Arms, located – as per the description in The Human Factor – ‘behind St. James’s Street.’ (The King’s Arms is no longer in business, and Greene left no description of it beyond the one given in the above extract. Anyone seeking a simulacrum is advised to try The Red Lion in Crown Passage, an old and atmospheric little pub which retains a pre-war flavour: a Greene-ish combo of cosy and seedy. It’s easy to imagine sausages and secrets being bandied about in there.)
When Philby’s fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean defected in 1951, suspicion fell upon Philby. Summoned to a series of meetings at MI5’s HQ in Curzon St., Philby was subject to increasingly sharp interrogations. But Philby refused to confess and his friends in MI6 stood by their man, even though MI5 remained suspicious. Philby resigned instead. The frustration of unimpressed MI5 investigators may be judged by the fact that they kept Philby under surveillance after his resignation from MI6. It is worth noting that MI6 was made up of well-connected, ‘clubbable’ old boys and toffs; whereas the ranks of MI5 were largely drawn from the armed forces and the police.
In 1955, Philby was named in the House of Commons as a possible traitor once rumours of a ‘third man’ began to circulate: but he faced down these accusations with extraordinary chutzpah, calling a press conference in his mother’s South Kensington flat after his ‘exoneration’ by an internal MI6 inquiry, and received an apology from the Labour MP who had made the allegations. Amazingly, he was later re-recruited into MI6 and worked as a journalist, agent and double agent in Beirut until 1963, when MI6 finally realised his treachery, courtesy of a Soviet defector. Philby fled before he could be arrested; although some believe he was allowed to run, as a public trial of a traitor who’d spent years at the heart of the British establishment would have been even more embarrassing than having one turn up in Moscow. It was eventually revealed that there were actually five Soviet spies at the heart of British intelligence: Anthony Blunt was outed in 1979 and John Cairncross in 1990. Neither was prosecuted.
It’s fascinating to consider what Greene and Philby talked about during their lunches in The King’s Arms. The bond between them seemed strong, forged over a mutual love of booze and a natural flair for subordination, albeit one that ran a lot deeper on Philby’s part. Greene even contributed a foreword to Philby’s memoir, written in Moscow, My Secret War. In his biography of Greene, Norman Sherry was sharp with his subject on this point: Greene had a horror of personal betrayal and Philby betrayed everyone, so why make a moral exception in his case? But after Greene’s death Sherry received a letter disclosing that Greene was feeding information about his later correspondence with Philby back to MI6, suggesting that Greene might have remained a British agent well into his seventies – and that his public indulgence of Philby was an elaborate front.
The Human Factor is an interesting foray into Le Carre territory, although its depiction of late 1970s English life seems anachronistic. It was made into a dull film by Greene’s friend Otto Preminger. They ran out of money during shooting and Preminger had to sell a Matisse and a spare house to finish it. The film is notable for Nicol Williamson’s performance as Greene’s conflicted spy, but its cramped budget makes it looks a bit like late 1970s TV: a dud episode of The Sweeney, perhaps, one without any car chases. It is also hampered by a wooden performance by supermodel Iman as Williamson’s screen wife. (An amazing piece of trivia about this film is that Preminger reportedly considered author, Tory peer and former jailbird Jeffrey Archer for the lead – but this was dropped when they realised that Archer was about a foot shorter than Iman.)
Philby, like Guy Burgess, was an old Etonian; and, whilst they might have been traitors for Stalin, they never abandoned the privileges of their own class. That nameless, numberless people might be tortured and killed as a result of their actions was to them an abstraction; the same mechanism that allowed 18th century old boys to squander colossal fortunes in the gaming rooms of White’s, Brooks’s, et al. It is a very specific kind of entitlement; one only has to look at the Britain of our own time to see that high-stakes gambling regardless of consequences is still pursued with zeal by old Etonians at the highest levels of government. Europe was lost in the debating chambers of Eton.
