John Storer went off to search the farm buildings for signs of clandestine radio systems, while I slipped the catch and went inside the house. The house was unbelievably untidy. All along the corridors and passageways piles of junk lined the walls. Books were stacked up in mounds in the downstairs rooms. At first I thought perhaps they were moving house, until I noticed the thick layer of dust on top of everything. In the backroom study stood two desks side by side. The one on the left was a huge roll-top desk crammed so full that it could not be closed. The one on the right was a small bureau. I opened the flap, and it was completely empty. I slid the drawers out. They were empty too, with not a trace of dust. The whole thing had obviously been emptied recently. I sat for a moment in a polished Windsor chair staring at the two desks, trying to make sense of one so full and the other so empty. Had the contents of one been transferred into the other? Or had one been emptied, and if so why? Was it suspicious, or was it just what it seemed - an empty desk in a junk-infested house?
I made a start on the papers in the other desk, but they were mostly farm business. John Storer found nothing outside, and we left. To search the place properly would have taken twenty men a week. In the end Charles Elwell went up to see Sokolov Grant and asked a few questions in the village. He came back satisfied that he was in the clear. He was popular locally, and his wife was the daughter of the local squire. We assumed Golitsin had seen Sokolov Grant's name on a KGB watch list, marked down as someone they contemplated approaching but never in fact did.
Shortly afterward Sokolov Grant and his wife left the area. Our inquiries had probably leaked in the village, and he presumably wanted to make a new start. But for all its apparent meaninglessness the Sokolov Grant story has always had symbolic importance to me: an ordinary man suddenly falling under suspicion, and just as abruptly cleared again, his life utterly changed because of something a man he has never met says in a darkened room on the other side of the world. The quiet rural world of Suffolk colliding with the secret world of betrayal, where there is no such thing as coincidence, and where suspicion can be fueled at the sight of an empty desk.
The most tightly held of all Golitsin's serials were those which suggested a penetration of MI5. I first learned of them from Arthur shortly after he returned from Washington. Golitsin said that he had seen the special safe in KGB headquarters where documents from British Intelligence were stored. He had seen the index to the documents stored in the safe, and he was positive that very recent material from MI5 was in there. He also claimed the KGB had acquired a document from British Intelligence which they called the "Technics" Document: a thick document listing technical equipment for British Intelligence. He was unable to study it closely, as he was only called in to see if he could translate a small passage from it. But it was obviously an important document, as there was great urgency in obtaining the translation. He said that security arrangements were different in the London Embassy. There was no special security officer (known as the "SK" officer [Soviet Kolony]). Golitsin assumed none was needed because the penetration of MI5 was so complete. Then there was the Crabbe Affair. He said the KGB got advance warning of Crabbe's mission against the cruiser ORDZHONIKIDZE.
In August 1962, as MI5 were busy digesting the mass of Golitsin material, we had a major breakthrough with the three original Philby serials. Victor Rothschild met Flora Solomon, a Russian emigre Zionist, at a party at the Weizmans' house in Israel. She told him that she was very indignant about articles Philby had written in the OBSERVER which were anti-Israel. She then confided that she knew Philby to have been a secret agent since the 1930s. With great difficulty, Victor managed to persuade her to meet Arthur Martin in London, to tell him her story. I was asked to microphone Victor's flat, where the interview was to take place. I decided to install temporary SF, which made Victor nervous.
"I don't trust you buggers to take the SF off!" he told me, and made me promise to personally supervise the installation and its removal. Victor was always convinced that MI5 were clandestinely tapping him to find out details of his intimate connections with the Israelis, and his furtiveness caused much good-humored hilarity in the office. But I gave Victor my word and met the Post Office technicians in the afternoon before the interview, carefully checking as they modified the telephone receiver. Later, when the interview was finished, I solemnly watched while they removed the washer again.
I monitored the interview back at Leconfield House on the seventh floor. Flora Solomon was a strange, rather untrustworthy woman, who never told the truth about her relations with people like Philby in the 1930s, although she clearly had a grudge against him. With much persuasion, she told Arthur a version of the truth. She said she had known Philby very well before the war. She had been fond of him, and when he was working in Spain as a journalist with THE TIMES he had taken her out for lunch on one of his trips back to London. During the meal he told her he was doing a very dangerous job for peace - he wanted help. Would she help him in the task? He was working for the Comintern and the Russians. It would be a great thing if she would join the cause. She refused to join the cause, but told him that he could always come to her if he was desperate.
Arthur held back from quizzing her. This was her story, and it mattered little to us whether she had, in reality, as we suspected, taken more than the passive role she described during the 1930s. Every now and then she became agitated.
"I will never give public evidence," she said in her grating voice. "There is too much risk. You see what has happened to Tomas since I spoke to Victor," she said, referring to the fact that one of Philby's friends, Tomas Harris, the art dealer, had recently died in a mysterious car accident in Spain.
"It will leak, I know it will leak," she would screech," and then what will my family do?"
But although she professed fear of the Russians, she seemed to have ambivalent feelings toward Philby himself. She said she still cared for him, and then later rambled on about the terrible way he treated his women. Although she never admitted it, I guessed from listening to her that she and Philby must have been lovers in the 1930s. Years later she was having her revenge for the rejection she felt when he moved into a new pair of sheets.
Armed with Golitsin's and Solomon's information, both Dick White for MI6 and Roger Hollis agreed that Philby should be interrogated again out in Beirut. From August 1962 until the end of the year, Evelyn McBarnet drew up a voluminous brief in preparation for the confrontation. But at the last minute there was a change of plan. Arthur was originally scheduled to go to Beirut. He had pursued the Philby case from its beginning in 1951, and knew more about it than anyone. But he was told that Nicholas Elliott, a close friend of Philby's, who had just returned from Beirut where he had been Station Chief, would go instead. Elliott was now convinced of Philby's guilt, and it was felt he could better play on Philby's sense of decency. The few of us inside MI5 privy to this decision were appalled. It was not simply a matter of chauvinism, though, not unnaturally, that played a part. We in MI5 had never doubted Philby's guilt from the beginning, and now at last we had the evidence we needed to corner him. Philby's friends in MI6, Elliott chief among them, had continually protested his innocence. Now, when the proof was inescapable, they wanted to keep it in-house. The choice of Elliott rankled strongly as well. He was the son of the former headmaster of Eton and had a languid upper-class manner. But the decision was made, and in January 1963 Elliott flew out to Beirut, armed with a formal offer of immunity.