My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy

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Epub ISBN: 9781407060231

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Published by Arrow Books in 2003

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Copyright © 1968 by H. A. R. Philby

Introduction copyright © 2002 by Phillip Knightley

H. A. R. Philby has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or

otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the

publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in the United Kingdom in 1968 by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd.

This edition published by arrangement with The Estate of Kim Philby.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to David Higham Associates for

permission to reprint the foreword by Graham Greene to
My Silent War
by

Kim Philby (Granada Publishing Ltd., London). Reprinted by permission.

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“Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard Philby had confessed. . . . It is one thing to suspect the truth; it is another to hear it from a man’s lips. Suddenly there was very little fun in the game anymore; a Rubicon had been crossed. . . . To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed away, and the dark ages began.”

—P
ETER
W
RIGHT
, former assistant director of MI5

“Kim Philby is a legend—a demon or an antihero, depending on one’s philosophical bent. Philby himself, or a thinly disguised fictional counterpart, stalks through many modern spy novels.”

—R
OBERT
J. L
AMPHERE
, FBI special agent

“[Philby] never revealed his true self. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves ever managed to pierce the armour of mystery that clad him. His great achievement in espionage was his life’s work, and it fully occupied him until the day he died. But in the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.”

—Y
URI
M
ODIN
, KGB controller of “the Cambridge Spies”

“Philby has no home, no women, no faith. Behind the inbred upper-class arrogance, the taste for adventure, lies the self-hate of a vain misfit for whom nothing will ever be worthy of his loyalty. In the last instance, Philby is driven by the incurable drug of deceit itself.”

—J
OHN LE
C
ARRÉ

C
ONTENTS

MY SILENT WAR

I
NTRODUCTION

Harold Adrian Russell Philby—“Kim” to his friends and family—has been part of my life for the past thirty years. I have written hundreds of thousands of words about Philby, appeared in many television and radio documentaries discussing him, and once spent a whole week talking to him in Moscow for six or seven hours a day. I have read every word of the more than twenty books written about him. I know his children and grandchildren and I keep in touch with his widow. Yet when people ask me, “What was Philby really like?,” I have to reply, “I’m not certain I know.”

So before you embark on the journey of reading this, the only book Philby ever wrote about himself, before you decide whether it is a frank confession, a fascinating justification for his life, or an insidious piece of Communist propaganda—or possibly all three—let me tell you what I know about a man whose motives and exploits continue to intrigue a new generation fifteen years after his death.

We should begin by giving Philby his professional due. In the history of espionage there has never been a spy like him, and now, with the Cold War over, there never will be. His achievements seem incredible. He joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
in 1940 and in three years rose to be head of its anti-Soviet section. Yet right from his Cambridge University days this urbane, pipe-smoking paragon of the English middle class had been an agent of the KGB. So the man running British operations against the Russians was actually working for the Russians himself. No wonder so few British plans worked. No wonder so many Western agents who slipped behind the Iron Curtain were never heard of again.

Worse was to come. In 1949 Philby was promoted to be the British Secret Service’s liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and the FBI. This gave him access not only to British operations against Moscow but to American ones as well. The result: at the height of the Cold War, every move the West made against the Communist bloc was betrayed by Philby before it even began. And there was every possibility that had it not been for one mistake, Philby would have gone on to become CSS, Chief of the British Secret Service. The KGB would, in effect, have been running MI6, a disaster that could have changed the course of the Cold War.

This did not happen because Philby had shared his house in Washington with a fellow KGB agent, the British Foreign Office official Guy Burgess, and when Burgess fled to Moscow in 1951, Philby came under suspicion in the United States. He lingered on as a spy until 1963, doing freelance work for MI6 in Beirut under cover as a journalist, until his KGB masters, fearing that the British now had sufficient evidence to prosecute him and that the CIA might try to kill him, “brought me home to Moscow.”

Back in 1968, with two colleagues on the
Sunday Times
of London, I wrote the first book about Philby—
Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation
. I then corresponded with Philby for twenty years and, in 1988, just three months before he died, spent a week with him, taking him step by step through his life.

We used
My Silent War
to jog his memory. He told me that he had been working on the book intermittently ever since he had come to Moscow, but had been doubtful that the KGB would ever let him publish it. When my book came out in Britain, the KGB arranged for Philby’s book to be rushed into print. “But a lot of it
was cut out,” Philby said. “And I didn’t have enough time to add new material.” It was clear that the book had enhanced his reputation within the KGB, although there were still some officers who wanted nothing to do with him. He was invited to give lectures to training classes, and occasionally he was shown files concerning difficult operational cases and asked for his view. He warned his masters against becoming too involved in Africa and did his best to deter them from invading Afghanistan. Then, in the stultifying years of the Brezhnev regime, he slumped into a long period of despair. He cheered up when the former head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, became leader, and when Mikhail Gorbachev took over, Philby was ecstatic. “This is the man we’ve been waiting for,” he said. He was annoyed that American commentators were suggesting that the West should wait to see whether Gorbachev meant what he said about peaceful coexistence, or whether his words concealed an aim to control Western Europe, China, and Japan. “Such a suggestion is ridiculous,” Philby said. “We have enough problems of our own without taking on other people’s. This is just another myth, like all that talk of the Soviet Union being a ‘Threat to the West’ since the end of the war. In 1945, the Soviet Union was exhausted. The United States had the atomic bomb. What would we hope to gain by deliberately attacking Western Europe? No one wants to be incinerated.”

My main impression of Philby during these talks was that here was a man at ease with himself in the twilight of his life, happy to exist quietly in his comfortable Moscow apartment and, since he was not sorry that his career as a spy was over, prepared to speak frankly about what it had involved. I did my best to get to the core of the man, no easy task with a master spy for whom deception is a professional skill. He was a charming, witty, and amusing host with a mind as sharp as a cut-throat razor. Although we mostly discussed espionage and politics, I sought his views on marriage, friendship, patriotism, honor, loyalty, treachery, betrayal, and the human condition. He talked about his favorite spy-thriller writers, today’s youth, modern music, and the difficulties of life in the Soviet
Union—but also its rewards. He touched on his health, Soviet medicine, his finances, a trip he had made to Cuba, his travels within the Eastern bloc, and his memories of his colleagues in the CIA, including a list of those he would like to see again. But since then I have learned things he never even hinted at, such as his role in the exposure and eventual execution of the American atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; the missing year in his life as a spy; what the KGB really thought about him; and, most astonishing of all, how MI6 tried to persuade him to re-defect to Britain.