Declare

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In my experience stories never write themselves—but they do often suggest or even strongly indicate themselves. Being a John le Carré fan, I happened one day to read his introduction to The Philby Conspiracy, by Page, Leitch, and Knightley, and I was so struck by the mysteries surrounding Kim Philby and his father that I read that book, and then Boyle’s The Fourth Man—and it s oon became evident to me that a novel could be woven around these characters and events. Eventually I discovered that, in fact, novels such as Ted All-beury’s fine The Other Side of Silence had already been.

But as I went on to read Eleanor Philby’s Kim Philby: The Spy I Married, and Borovik’s and Modin’s books providing the KGB perspective, and Philby’s own My Silent War, I found that the incidents that intrigued me were the apparently peripheral ones. I kept being nagged by a feeling that the central element of the story had been almost completely omitted, to be derived now only by finding and tracing its fugitive outlines.

In a way, I arrived at the plot for this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet—they look for “perturbations,” wobbles, in the orbits of the planets they’re aware of, and they calculate the mass and position of an unseen planet whose gravitational field could have caused the observed perturbations—and then they turn their telescopes on that part of the sky and search for a gleam. I looked at all the seemingly irrelevant “wobbles” in the lives of these people—Kim Philby, his father, T. E. Lawrence, Guy Burgess—and I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar—and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.

After all, why did Philby spend two days in drunken grief when his pet fox fell to her death in Beirut, in September of 1962? In Nicholas Elliott’s autobiography we’re told that Philby and Eleanor brought the fox back “from a visit to Saudi Arabia,”¹ and Philby himself, in an article published in Country Life in 1962, describes the fox as chewing pipe stems and licking up whisky; Eleanor notes that they “were all desolate”² at the fox’s death, but the only other time Philby gave in so to grief was at the death of his father, precisely two years earlier.

The garment Philby was seen wearing in Spain on the evening of December 31, 1937, after the car he was in was struck by a Russian artillery round, has been described by both Anthony Cave Brown in Treason in the Blood and Phillip Knightley in The Master Spy as a woman’s moth-eaten coat; the implication being that some Good Samaritan had draped him in it. But Philby himself, quoted in Genrikh Borovik’s later and more authoritative The Philby Files, says, “I looked so picturesque that I later read somewhere that someone had put a woman’s fur coat on me after the explosion. In fact I was wearing the coat my father had given me, which he had received from one of his Arab princes. It was a very amusing piece of tailoring: bright green fabric on the outside and bright red fox fur on the inside.”³

And at the end of the “Bitter Waters” chapter in St. John Philby’s The Empty Quarter, he describes being led by a fox to a meteorite in the Arabian desert. The elder Philby, in fact, devotes an appendix to “Meteorites and Fulgurites,” and in Declare I respectfully adhere to his description of the Wabar meteor-strike site (at least until the supernatural intervenes). In another appendix he notes that Arabs believe that some stones in the desert walk about, leaving a track in the sand. They attribute this remarkable power to the work of spirits,”⁴ though earlier in the book he says, “I reserved judgment on the ‘walking stones’ until they could be produced to perform in my presence.”⁵ Also in The Empty Quarter is St. John’s description of his dreams in the Rub’ al-Khali desert: “My dreams these nights were nightmare vistas of long low barrack buildings whirling round on perpetually radiating gravel rays of a sandy desert, while I took rounds of angles on ever moving objects with a theodolite set on a revolving floor. It was the strangest experience of my life.”⁶

In his autobiography, Arabian Days, St. John mentions the comet that blazed across the sky on the Good Friday of his birth; and Knightley, in The Master Spy, recounts the story that the infant St. John was left behind in Ceylon and discovered later as one of a pair of identically dressed babies being nursed by a “gypsy” woman. This reminded me of the account, in 1 Kings 3, of Solomon offering to split the baby claimed by two women—a story that had always seemed to me insufficiently explained.

In The Master Spy we’re told that St. John “took up the collection and study of early Semitic inscriptions in Arabia and increased from some two thousand to over thirteen thousand the number of known Thamudic inscriptions.”⁷ And in Brown’s Treason in the Blood we learn that St. John Philby took possession of T. E. Lawrence’s personal files covering the years 1914 through 1921.

What would have been in those files, which were subsequently “lost”? Something had happened to Lawrence in the Syrian town of Dera on the night of November 21, 1917, after the failure of a covert operation of his own near the north end of the Dead Sea; in his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, on which he spent six years plagued by self-doubt and the theft of an early draft, Lawrence claimed to have been captured by Turkish soldiers and raped by the Turkish governor of Dera. But his grisly account does not fit with the facts and timetables, and according to George Bernard Shaw, Lawrence “told me that his account of the affair is not true.”⁸ In 1922 Lawrence joined the RAF under an assumed name, and when this disguise was exposed he joined the Royal Tank Corps under another. What ordeal could have been so stressful and outre and secret that homosexual rape was a more mundane cover story?— and left him with an apparent tendency to manifest multiple identities? Preparatory to the inquest on Lawrence’s death in 1935, a witness was officially told not to mention the “black car or van”⁹ he claimed to have seen passing Lawrence’s motorcycle moments before the fatal crash.

A year earlier, working for a Russian secret service, Kim Philby had photographed his father’s secret papers, and those papers would have included the lost Lawrence files.

Philby was recruited into the British secret service by Guy Burgess, and many have speculated that Burgess had preemptively recruited him into a Soviet one before that. The in media res death of Burgess’s father is mentioned in Andrew Boyle’s The Fourth Man; and in My Five Cambridge Friends the retired Soviet agent-runner Yuri Modin notes the “persistent rumor that Guy had once actually run down and killed a man in Dublin during the war.”¹⁰

I found many clues, many “perturbations,” especially when St. John’s obsession with Arabia led me to the various versions of the Thousand Nights and One Night. From the stories in that primordial text I was able to deduce the nature of the forces called djinn—their peculiar attachment to objects and physical arrangements—and to speculate on the insistently recurrent image of a “Castle of the Mountain of Clouds, which, built by one of the djinn who revolted from the covenant of Solomon, was cut off from the rest of the world.”¹¹ In his translation, Richard F. Burton mentions stories of the Devil trying to get aboard the Ark, and says that “people had seen and touched the ship on Ararat.”¹² And when at last I had calculated the nature of a big-but-unrecorded fact that could have caused the perturbations, I went looking for evidence of it.

And it was all right there in Kim Philby’s life. Anthony Cave Brown notes that in 1919 Prince Feisal had formally given young Kim a twenty-carat diamond, and I did not invent the designation or function of a rafiq. Philby was SIS Head of Station in Turkey in 1947 and ’48, and in his coy autobiography, My Silent War, he explains, or does not quite explain, his proposed “photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet frontier area… I called it Operation Spyglass… it would give me a cast-iron pretext for a long, hard look at the Turkish frontier region… I had learnt long before, while working for the Times, some of the tricks of dressing implausible thoughts in language that appealed to the more sober elements in the Athenaeum.”¹³ And a page or two earlier: “After a first summer of reconnaissance, I would be better equipped for a more ambitious programme in 1948.”¹⁴ In The Philby Conspiracy I learned that he “kept an odd souvenir of the period which in later years he displayed in his apartment in Beirut: a large photograph of Mount Ararat which stands on the Turkish– Soviet border.”¹⁵ The rope attached to the dashboard of Philby’s jeep is described in Something Ventured, the autobiography of Monty Woodhouse, who was SIS Head of Station in Iran in 1951.

The explanation I arrived at was, admittedly, a fantastic one; not one that le Carré would have come up with, I daresay. But when I had fitted the djinn postulate in among all the published facts, they all fell satisfactorily into place at last, and suddenly made “sense.” Even my protagonist, Andrew Hale, was suggested by the fact that St. John Philby and young Kim did collect samples of water from the Jordan River in the summer of 1923; according to Anthony Cave Brown, “The collection had a purpose. It was claimed that the water contained special properties, and for centuries it had been drawn at that point and sent to England for christenings; they [St. John and Kim] would send the water to the British Museum to establish whether it really contained holy properties.”¹⁶ The implied previous baptism there, and St. John’s evident concern about it, gave me the shape of Andrew Hale.

In his Moscow retirement Philby insisted that he had fled Beirut in 1963 aboard the Soviet freighter Dolmatova—though he was “short-tempered” when interviewer Phillip Knightley pressed him for details—but according to Eleanor, “I believe he walked a good deal of the way,”¹⁷ and in The Philby Conspiracy we hear that “Philby told one of his children that he arrived in Moscow with his feet heavily bruised from a long and difficult walk.”¹⁸ Early accounts of his escape have him crossing the border near Ararat, and in conversation with Knightley published in the last chapter of The Master Spy, Philby is quick to cut off a discussion of his old photograph of Mount Ararat. Knightley, and Chapman Pincher in Too Secret Too Long, agree that immediately upon his arrival in Moscow Philby was put into a KGB clinic.

And Philby, though an unbaptized atheist, did always seem to be uneasy with Christianity, particularly with Roman Catholicism. Brown recounts Philby’s claim of having suffered a nervous break-down at Westminster School because of the “unending Christian instruction”¹⁹ and also describes a visit Philby paid to a Roman Catholic ARAMCO political agent in Riyadh, shortly after St. John’s death—they discussed Catholicism, and Philby was so knowledgeable and at the same time so nervous about the faith that the agent wondered if he were not a lapsed Catholic considering reconciliation. Nicholas Elliott’s wife was a practicing Catholic, and in his autobiography Elliott mentions a cocktail party at which Philby mockingly asked her if she really did have “a firm purpose of amendment” each time she went to Confession; and I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to see in Philby’s banter a trace of wistful envy.

In her book, Eleanor Philby recounts how in 1963 Nicholas Elliott, having failed to persuade her not to fly to Moscow to visit Philby, took her to a cinema that was showing the Hitchcock movie The Birds. Elliott bought her ticket but then left her to watch it alone, presumably hoping that the movie might effectively make a point that he could not convey. Into his silence I’ve presumed to fit the admittedly extravagant—but, I think, consistent—premise of this story.

¹ Nigel West, ed. “The The Faber Book of Espionage (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 336.

² Eleanor Philby, Kim Philby: The Spy I Married (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), p. 6.

³ Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 100.

⁴ H. St. J. B. Philby, The Empty Quarter (New York: Henry Holt, 1933), p. 378.

⁵ Ibid., p. 81.

⁶ Ibid., p. 164.

⁷ Phillip Knightley, The Master Spy (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 20.

⁸ Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia(New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 213.

⁹ Ibid., p. 361.

¹⁰ Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), p. 10.

¹¹ Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Arabian Nights (New York: Viking, 1952), p. 569.

¹² Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (New York: Heritage, 1962), p. 479.

¹³ Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 175–76.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 173.

¹⁵ Bruce Page, David Leitch, and Phillip Knightley, The Philby Conspiracy (New York Doubleday, 1968), p. 195.

¹⁶ Anthony Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 75.

¹⁷ Eleanor Philby, op. cit., p. 72.

¹⁸ Page, Leitch, Knightley, op. cit., p. 290.

¹⁹ Anthony Cave Brown, op. cit., p. 133.