Stalin’s Englishman by Andrew Lownie

Author:Andrew Lownie [Andrew Lownie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2015-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

28

Disgrace

On Friday 19 January 1951, the Philbys held a formal dinner party for twelve, which was to become notorious in Burgess’s path of self-destruction. Among the guests were the CIA’s head of the Office of Special Operations, which involved international liaison James Angleton and his wife Cicely; William Harvey, a former FBI agent responsible for counter-intelligence at the CIA and his hard-drinking wife Libby; Robert Lamphere, the FBI liaison to the CIA and his wife; Robert Mackenzie, the British embassy’s regional security officer for the Americas, with Geraldine Dack, one of Philby’s secretaries, and Wilfrid Mann and his wife Miriam.

The couples were enjoying coffee when Burgess returned to the Philby house about 9.30 p.m. He was:

in his usual aggressive mood and, almost immediately after being introduced, he commented to [Mrs Harvey] that it was strange to see the face he had been doodling all his life suddenly appear before him. She immediately responded by asking him to draw her. She was a pleasant woman, but her jaw was a little prominent; Guy caricatured her face … so that it looked like the prow of a dreadnought with its underwater battering ram.1

‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life,’ Mrs Harvey shouted and stormed out of the house with her equally angry husband. Philby remonstrated it was just a joke and Burgess had meant no harm, but Harvey was having none of it. ‘He saw in Burgess’s gratuitous insult an aristocratic contempt for his unadorned Midwestern background and that of his college dropout wife.’2

Aileen was shattered. Her important dinner party had been destroyed by a man she despised. Whilst Miriam Mann and Cicely Angleton comforted her in the kitchen, the unrepentant Burgess helped himself to drinks, to celebrate his coup against Harvey. James Angleton and Wilfrid Mann, escaping from the highly charged atmosphere, went outside. On returning, Mann found Philby, in short-sleeves and bright red braces, in a darkened room with his head in his hands. ‘The man who had never been known to lose his self-control, the pride of the British service, was weeping. In between his anguished sobs, he kept saying to himself over and over, “How could you, how could you?” One Soviet spy had, in the home of another Soviet spy, insulted the man whose job it was to flush out Soviet spies. As Talleyrand would have put it, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.’3 Burgess might have enjoyed his momentary triumph over Harvey, but he had made himself a powerful enemy.

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