AFTERWORD

Kim Philby died in the early morning of May 11, 1988, of arrhythmia of the heart, at the KGB clinic in Moscow. His last words were in reply to a telephoned congratulations on the anniversary of the Soviet victory of 1945: “What victory?” Philby said.

He was buried in the Novodiverchy cemetery near Red Square.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed three and a half years later, in December of 1991; Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Soviet President on Christmas Day.

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 soon 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 Allbeury’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 “The 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]