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i cOTETTTSovict rest home, with twice daily temperature, takings and monastic diet * Now the Macl were no longer news, They had beta seen by the Western Press aod their . Buovements were necessarily freer than ours gould be. “Although Donald was never very ‘articulate he would occasionally Joosen up over a bottle of wine and reminisce, with Kim over the * good , old days. They would sit around, ‘swapping stale anecdotes about their st and laughing at how they had Pooled everyone. ‘If they hada’t caught up with Kim, you'd be Lady Philby by now,’ Donald once said to me. y think he must have realised from my expression how distasteful “I found that tort of talk. Other evenings, in moments of nostalgia, . Donald and Melinda would talk of the good times they would have in 7 fltaly and Paris “when the Revolu- tion comes.” J found this world of fantasy pathetic and slightly un- nerving. During this period Kim never ", went out to work except for a rare meeting with Sergei, and. the boys, presumably at their office. Most of ‘the work was done at home. Ho did quite a lot of typing in tho study and » talked at length with~his Russian Visitors. After years in British Intet- ligence. Kim knew a great deaf about its methods, operations and men. t realised that rival Intelligence agencies spend much of their timo attacking each other, seeking to pene- trate each other's organisations and “tum each other's agents, It may be assumed that Kim is advising the Russians along these lines. He must be enormously useful. with his prodigious memory. For the Rus- sians he must be like a reference- book, ‘as valuable, say, as Baedeker to a traveller in Europe. I once heard Sergei say to him _ with deep affection and emotion : We can never repay you for the work you've done for us.’ ‘The way Kim was treated in Moscow made clear to me that he was one of them. There were no longer any doubts or questions on that point. Loyalty ‘means a great deal to the Russians, and Kim had been a dedicated ser- - vant. He was given VIP treatment. Ordinary Russian citizens queued for hours for tickets to the Bolshoi and the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire, but ‘we could see whatever opera, ballet ‘of concert we chose. In those eatly amonths we frequently went with the “Macleans, which was a pleasant ‘change from the bridge table. All | the arrangements for tickets were {: made -through Sergei, or his young assistant. Victor, “ | The November parade in 1963— with May Day, one of the two great annual pageants —. was another . occasion when I noticed the great deference with which Kim was Created. A car uni chauifeu came to fetch us, equipped with ~ special stickers, and Sergei, with | passes. escorted us through a maze of i security guards to splendidly placed eeer, Line a guest Bias year—-and the other -high-rankisy Soviet “eaders. Throughout the display we sere served with hot wine and dough- nuts. The Macleans did not bother to come : they had seen it all before and preferred to watch on television, At meals the conversation was of the familiar pattern: ‘Remember old ¢o-and-so?*, Donald might say. and they would laugh heartily over the tricks they had played on him eof e In ovember. Mrs Philby entered hospital for an operation which she had postponed for months. On the morning of 23 November _ 1 was lying in hospital trying to figure out what my neighbours were saying. All I could understand was the name John Fitzgerald, and the fact that they were all upset. It was not until Kim arrived at noon that I learned the terrible news that Presi- dent Kennedy had been assassinated ‘In moments of nostalgia, Donald and Melinda would talk of the good times they , would have in Italy and Paris when the Revo- lution comes.’ in Dallas on the previous day. The effect on the hospital was shattering. Doctors, nurses and patients wept openly.” As most of them knew 1 was an American, I was offered the most tender condolences. Whatever the political cynicism of the Russian leaders, the Russian people are profoundly attached to peace, To them Kennedy was aman of peace, and they moumed his death. Kim, who talked a great deal about American politics, was also profoundly moved and depressed by the tragedy. After Mrs Philby left hospital, ° she went with her husband to Baku, on the Caspian Sea, 10 recuperate. it was Christmas— “not a very gay one.” Lhad been in Russia barely three months but in those few days in Baku I had my first glimpse of Kim's real feelings—the sea of sadness which lay beneath the surface of his life. He never complained, nor uitered a word of criticism of Soviet hic. He sad to mes ‘I've landed you in a situation you per- haps did not anticipate when you married me.’ He never seemed to think that any justification was neces-° ne Dud not OW Me WE wus. in spite of his discipline, 1 4 ‘him # profound gloom, Wa: this wwiely hotel room in Baku what he had spent a lifetime working for ? Tt was perhaps to escape that intoler- able conclusion that he drank him- self into insensibitity. In Beirut 1 had become used to his occasional mysterious depressions; coming to Russia had apparently not cured him of them. . . “They're the happiest couple in Moscow,’ Melinda Maclean would say of us. Innocently f saw no more in this often repeated phrase than & wry comment on her own married life and a barbed attack on Donald. But however one lodked at it, it was hardly an exact description of us that winter. We loved each other even more deeply. but a great change in our lives had taken place, and al] the recent tensions would take time and patience to iron out, The extreme cold—outside of Siberia, I could not believe such cold was possible—was a great shock to me. Kim adored it, like his Russian} friends, but his body could not take| it. He came down with his old com-| plaint, pneumonia, which he had had! twice in Beiret, and Sergei, extremely wortied, sent a nurse and doctor to give Kim daily vitamin injections. ‘As soon as he recovered from pneumonia, he developed scaly eruptions on his hands—a reaction. I felt, to the nervous tension he was under. The eczema was not con- tagious, but it obviously lowered his morale. He could not hold a tazor in his bandaged hands. and I used to have to help him shave. At the bridge table, it was difficult for him to hold the catds. He: longer type and, unlike the old days, I was not able to help him as the work was secret. ‘Sergei brought him a Dictaphone, but he did not use it, Two or three times a week we took him to the clinic to have the skin specialist ex- amine his hands and put on fresh bandages, but the complaint did not clear up for several weeks. Barrier grows ~ Kim talked a good deal that winter about peace. He continued to stress that the Russians were far more interested in peace than in making bombs, and that if only the Western world could be convinced of this our ld no - children would have peaceful lives. ° Neither he nor his friends over attempted to lecture or brainwash me, nor did he ram his ideotogy dowa my throat. ; ‘Apan from this new theme of peace. Our conversations were as much fun os in Beirut, but as the weeks went by the barrier between us grew and I began to fee} that we coulid not recover the complete con- fulence we once had in each other. Inthe harsh climate and unfamiliar atmosphere of Russia, we had less time for our old intimate chats. Our minds were focused on the complexi- : KY / EVEL