I went to the rue Kantari in Beirut to try to find Kim Philby’s flat. The street, which stands on top of the hill of Ras Beirut and looks out over the sparkling lights of St George Bay, is full of handsome limestone buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in the 16th arrondissement. Most are now abandoned shells, the balustrades and architraves still spattered with bullet holes from the civil war, the windows missing their glass. Around the corner on the buzzy rue Hamra the bars and shops blazed with light and music, but rue Kantari, site of one of the most famous acts of the Cold War, was dark. On the night of 23 January 1963, during a fierce rainstorm, Philby walked down the five flights of stairs from the flat he shared with Eleanor Brewer, the former wife of the New York Times Middle East correspondent, Sam Brewer, and disappeared. It was six months before the Soviets announced that he had defected to Moscow and another five years before the British government fully acknowledged what had happened.

LRB 11 October 2012 | PDF Download