My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (2 page)

Philby came from an adventurous family. His father was Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a former magistrate in the Indian Civil Service, an explorer and an Arabist who became an adviser to King Saud. He held perverse political views and was interned at the start of the Second World War for telling Saud that he thought Hitler would win and that Saud should get his money out of pounds sterling. He felt that life should be lived to the hilt, an example he passed on to Kim. Women found the mix of idealism and love of action in both men an almost irresistible combination. After a tempestuous marriage, St. John Philby ended up with a Saudi slave girl. Kim had numerous affairs and married four times—a Viennese, an Englishwoman, an American, and a Russian. (The American joined him for a while in Moscow but left him when he expressed amazement that she should even bother to ask “If you had to choose between Communism and me, which would you choose?”)

Kim Philby was in the thick of events in the thirties as the lights began to go out over Europe. He helped smuggle Jews and Communists out of Vienna. He was wounded in the Spanish Civil War, which he covered for
The Times
from the Franco side—while reporting to the KGB on German and Italian weapons being used there. He was still with
The Times
in France in 1940 and got out just ahead of the Germans. His expense account for the belongings he lost as he fled via Boulogne is still in the archives of the newspaper—“Dunhill pipe (two years old but all the better for it) one pound ten shillings.” No wonder he looked an ideal recruit for MI6.

Yet this ideal recruit had already been signed up by the KGB back in 1934. Spotted while still at Cambridge because—like his fellow students Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, later known as the Cambridge spy ring—he believed that the Western democracies were unable to check the rise of Fascism and that only the Soviet Union could save the world. His critics—and, of course, there are many—while conceding that his initial commitment to the Soviet Union might have been understandable at the time, wonder how he could possibly have remained in the service of Moscow after the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939.

One new piece of information is that he did not. According to KGB files, he was worried that valuable secrets he was providing about the British Expeditionary Force and the French army might now be passed on to the Germans. He demanded of his controller, “What’s going to happen to the single-front struggle against Fascism now?” On February 20, 1940, the London resident of the KGB reported to Moscow that Philby’s controller in Paris no longer knew where Philby was and that efforts to find him had failed. Moscow replied that such efforts should cease—Philby was finished; he was to be left out in the cold.

But in 1941 the KGB learned to its surprise that without its orders and without its help, Philby had got into MI6. It hastened to get in touch with him again. This was a surreal period in the master spy’s career. It was clear that Germany was about to invade the Soviet Union: he could resume the anti-Fascist fight with a clear conscience.

But having reestablished contact with Philby, the KGB was suddenly very wary. What if he was part of a devilish MI6 plot to penetrate the KGB? It ordered counterintelligence officer Elena Modrzhinskaya (she is said to be still alive and well and living in Moscow) to examine Philby’s file and decide whether he was a genuine recruit to Communism or a British penetration agent.

The first point Modrzhinskaya raised with her bosses was the volume and value of the material Philby had sent to the KGB. Could MI6 really be run by such fools that no one had noticed that
precious information was leaking to Moscow? Next, was it really possible that Philby—with his Communist views, his work for the Communists in Vienna, and his Austrian Communist wife—had sailed through MI6’s vetting procedures? She concluded that Philby was really working for the British and that so too were all the other members of the Cambridge spy ring—except, perhaps, Donald Maclean.

Her report split the KGB. Many of its officers believed that she was wrong and that Philby was an outstanding and loyal agent. In the end they prevailed, and the KGB continued to use Philby and the Cambridge ring. But there was always a group within the KGB who refused to trust him, and their nagging influence made his early years of exile in Moscow a misery. Word of Philby’s unhappiness leaked back to London, and MI6 mounted an operation to convince him to return, to redefect. This was a secret, long-term, and persistent plan. How do I know of it? Maurice Oldfield, who had been head of MI6 at the time, told me after he had retired that persuading Philby to return had been a ongoing operation. And in 1997 I met the former East German spymaster Markus Wolf, who had been host to Philby on his visits to East Germany. Wolf said, “I was responsible for his security arrangements and I entertained him—we did a bit of cooking together at my place in the country. He had a KGB escort, and one evening this officer told me that the KGB lived in fear that Philby would go back to Britain, a move that would deal a propaganda blow to Moscow. He said that the British Secret Service in Moscow had found ways of making several offers to persuade Philby to return.” This was puzzling, because in his twenty-five years in the Soviet Union, Philby had kept his Moscow address a secret. He avoided all other Westerners. If he wanted to go to a restaurant, his KGB minder arranged it, usually reserving a private room. So the “several offers” could only have been made in person by someone who had access to him on more than one occasion, someone he knew well. What follows now is speculation, because it is often impossible to prove matters in the secret world, but only one man fits the bill—the British novelist Graham Greene.
Greene, who had been a colleague of Philby’s in MI6, had been corresponding with him since 1968, when, to the amazement of the literary world, he accepted an invitation from Philby’s British publishers and wrote the introduction to the first edition of this book. Then, in 1986, Greene went to Moscow and the two old spies got together for a reunion in Philby’s flat. Five months later, Greene went back to Moscow; he went again in September 1987, and then again in February 1988. He saw Philby each time.

From recent biographies of Greene, we now know that he reported on all these visits to MI6. Further, Greene has said that Philby would have expected him to do just that: “I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield [then head of MI6].”

Greene would never have made the offer to Philby without authorization, and it would appear most likely that it was Oldfield who gave him the go-ahead. Greene even gave a tantalizing hint of the operation in interviews with his official biographer, Professor Norman Sherry. Sherry told me, “Greene said he had this dream of seeing Philby come walking down the street towards him in Britain. I suspect that this was not a dream but Greene’s roundabout way of saying what he had been up to with Philby.”

Philby had no moral qualms about the agents he had betrayed during his spying career. He saw the struggle between Western intelligence and the KGB as a war. “There are always casualties in war,” he told me, adding, “Anyway, most of them were pretty nasty pieces of work and quite prepared themselves to kill if necessary.”

He told me at our Moscow meetings that he had regrets about the way he had handled some things but no regrets whatsoever about the life he had chosen. He was uneasy, however, when our talk turned to the American spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been sent to the electric chair in 1953 for betraying American atomic secrets to Moscow. But there was doubt at the time about their guilt, and allegations that they had been made scapegoats to appease American public concern that the Soviets had exploded
their own bomb in 1949—years before the CIA had predicted that they would. A worldwide campaign appealing to President Eisenhower for clemency was whipped up by national Communist parties, and there was international outrage when the president ignored it. Over the years, debate over the Rosenbergs’ guilt had not died out, so I asked Philby’s view. But apart from saying that all the Rosenbergs were guilty of was being “lowly couriers with no link to the main KGB atomic spy rings” and that he could not understand why Eisenhower denied them a reprieve, he refused to talk about them.

I did not learn why until 1996, when stories began to appear about the “Venona decrypts,” the successful American deciphering of radio traffic between Moscow and the Soviet consulate in New York in 1944–45. This material, which began to be decoded in the early 1950s, gave clues as to the identity of KGB spies in the West and was ultimately behind the uncovering of nearly every major Soviet spy in the postwar period. As MI6’s liaison officer in Washington, Kim Philby had had access to the Venona material and knew the way the FBI was using it. This was a great break for the KGB, but it put Philby in a difficult and dangerous position. What should he do as he followed the FBI’s homing in on his Soviet intelligence service comrades? If he were to use his knowledge of Venona to warn those most at risk so that they could flee, the FBI would suspect a leak. It would investigate everyone who had had access to Venona, including Philby, and he would never again enjoy the same degree of confidence. He made a brutal decision—he would tip off those agents who were of most importance to Moscow and sacrifice the others.

So he tipped off Donald Maclean, then a rising star in the Foreign Office, who fled to Moscow in May 1951. He tipped off Morris and Lona Cohen, responsible for couriering atom secrets stolen from Los Alamos to the Soviet consulate in New York, who fled the United States on an hour’s notice in June 1950.

But no one tipped off the Rosenbergs, because the KGB considered them expendable. And no one imagined that the Americans
would execute them. In the KGB’s eyes, according to Philby, “They were minor couriers, not significant sources, [and] provided no valuable secrets.” Philby felt guilty about the Rosenbergs for the rest of his life.

Why are we so intrigued by Philby? That someone was capable of such treachery puzzles and frightens us. If Philby did not do it for money—as has been the case with most American traitors—what did he do it for? Philby made a total ideological commitment when he was only twenty-one and had the strength of purpose to stick to it for the rest of his life. Like a character in a Graham Greene novel, he mixed duplicity and charm. In his treachery he risked all for his convictions, and he got away with it.

He recognized at one stage that things were going wrong in the Soviet Union but he told me that his choices were limited. “I couldn’t give up politics altogether. I’m too much the political animal. I could whine, as some have, that the cause had betrayed me. Or I could stick it out in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberrations of individuals, however enormous.” He had no doubt whatsoever about the verdict of history on this point, and four months later, before his beloved Communism collapsed, he died happy and fulfilled—perhaps his greatest coup of all.

P
HILLIP
K
NIGHTLEY
is an author and journalist who lives in London. He is best known for
The First Casualty
, a history of war correspondents and propaganda;
The Second Oldest Profession
, an examination of the role of intelligence services through the ages; and
Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby
.

F
OREWORD

This is not at all the book that Philby’s enemies anticipated. It is an honest one, well-written, often amusing, and the story he has to tell, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean, is far more gripping than any novel of espionage I can remember. We were told to expect a lot of propaganda, but it contains none, unless a dignified statement of his beliefs and motives can be called propaganda. The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson. “He betrayed his country”—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? In Philby’s own eyes he was working for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit.

Like many Catholics who, in the reign of Elizabeth, worked for the victory of Spain, Philby has a chilling certainty in the correctness of his judgement, the logical fanaticism of a man who, having once found a faith, is not going to lose it because of the injustices or cruelties inflicted by erring human instruments. How many a
kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope of the future as a riding anchor? Mistakes of policy would have had no effect on his faith, nor the evil done by some of his leaders. If there was a Torquemada now, he would have known in his heart that one day there would be a John XXIII. “It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the thirties; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made the choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course,” Philby writes, and he demands fairly enough what alternative there could possibly be to the bad Baldwin-Chamberlain era. “I saw the road leading me into the political position of the querulous outcast, of the Koestler-Crankshaw-Muggeridge variety, railing at the movement that had let
me
down, at the God that had failed
me
. This seemed a ghastly fate, however lucrative it might have been.”

His account of the British Secret Service is devastatingly true. “The ease of my entry surprised me. It appeared later that the only enquiry made into my past was a routine reference to MI5, who passed my name through their records and came back with the laconic statement: Nothing Recorded Against.” (He was luckier than I was. I had a police record, for after a libel action brought against me by Miss Shirley Temple, the papers had been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the trace had therefore to be submitted to C himself.) There was even a moment when Philby wondered whether it really was the Secret Service which he had entered. His first factual reports inclined his Soviet contact to the view that he had got into the wrong organization.