‘We can start now,’ said Philby.
‘Fine.’ Thomas turned and called, ‘Miss Meedla!’ The old crone appeared at once, as though she’d been standing outside the door. Thomas spoke to her in Swedish, and she grunted something and disappeared again.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Philby, ‘Miss Meedla doesn’t speak a word of English.’
Over the next week Philby spent an average of ten hours a day with Thomas. It was an arduous but ideal arrangement for a debriefing. There were no distractions, no recreations, except conversation and drink; and Thomas was generous with both. He showed no concern about Philby’s drinking. Philby could drink what he liked, as much as he liked, when he liked. The hours didn’t matter. Even the dull meals of ham, coleslaw and tinned fish were served to accommodate his drinking.
Sometimes he stayed up till the small hours, sometimes he passed out and woke before dawn, sometimes he began drinking early and slept half the day; but Thomas seemed always to be available, and although sober himself, he remained the perfect drinking companion — affable, responsive, patient. Occasionally, and only with Philby’s agreement, he took notes. His questions were intelligent, well informed and, above all, well timed. He never coerced or contradicted, never insinuated even a hint of doubt or scepticism; for Thomas was too experienced an interrogator to underestimate Kim Philby, even when the man was most drunk. Thomas knew just how far to push him, and just when to pull back; he never tried to trap him when he was drunk, and never made the mistake of assuming that Philby would have forgotten things when he was sober again.
Donaldson had left on the second day, but Hughes stayed on as a kind of batman-cum-butler, taking the car for the daily shopping in Medstugan, chopping wood for the stoves, and carrying Philby to bed when he was incapable of walking. There was no telephone in the house, but Philby guessed that there might be a short-wave radio — probably in the garage, which was always kept locked, even when the car was away. Philby never saw a newspaper or heard any news at all from outside; but far from complaining, he found the isolation restful, even stimulating.
Most of his sessions with Thomas were erratically informal. Philby’s various masters had always admired his precise mind, despite its alcoholic lapses, and his phenomenal memory; but even he found it difficult to keep track of their daily progress; and sometimes it seemed that Thomas himself had lost the thread. One afternoon, after a heavy liquid lunch when Philby had been building up to a detailed picture of his activities in Washington after the war, Thomas suddenly suggested a break; and when they resumed towards evening, he began instead asking about Philby’s financial difficulties after he’d been sacked by SIS in the wake of the Burgess-Maclean scandal. It was only next morning, almost casually, that Thomas brought him back to his contacts with the CIA.
At first these tactics puzzled Philby. For despite his innate contempt for Whitehall, he had never expected that they might send him an incompetent, or even an eccentric. Philby had agreed to cooperate with his former employers by supplying them with information, ‘in order to balance the books’, as Thomas put it. But Thomas was not merely collecting the information — he was supposed to collate it, correct and tidy it, so that the final dossier to London would be complete and coherent. Why, then, this haphazard technique?
Philby decided that the clue was in his own drinking. At first this would have appeared to be the one advantage that Thomas had over him, but Philby’s response to alcohol was so bizarre — his capacity to insulate certain compartments of his mind when drunk, and to recover his faculties both quickly and completely — were so notorious that his state of mind while drunk became an actual disadvantage to anyone trying to evaluate the exact worth of his information. Thomas was combating this with his own erratic tactics, so that Philby himself would become confused, and could never be certain whether Thomas had really lost his way or was deliberately changing the subject.
An easier solution for Thomas might, of course, have been to withhold all alcohol from him during his whole stay; but Philby reasoned that Thomas wanted him in his natural state, without pressures or privations. Philby was not, after all, a prisoner, or even a reluctant collaborator. He was merely fulfilling his side of a bargain.
At no time did Thomas imply that he might have been lying or holding out on him. But there was one matter that was never even broached: the identity of Philby’s former Communist friends and masters within the British Establishment. His silence here remained his guarantee against prosecution and possible elimination; and both he and Thomas knew that it was in their different interests that those names remained forever secret.
After the first four days, Thomas had exhausted Philby’s career between 1944 and 1951; and the next two days were taken up with details of his career with the KGB. Here Thomas probed for every scrap of information, however trivial; he wanted to know the brands of cigarettes the various agents smoked, whether they had certain privileges, like being able to shop at the Beriozkas; what clothes they wore, what books they read, music they preferred; which were womanizers, homosexuals, drinkers, gamblers, insomniacs; what their home life was like and where they took their holidays.
London would know many of these details, and Philby was careful not to lie or invent the answers; if he didn’t know, or wasn’t sure, he told Thomas, and they passed on to the next question. The
