My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (30 page)

It has been generally assumed that I was working under
journalistic cover for SIS. Indeed, it would have been odd if they had made no use of me at all. They habitually use journalists, and there I was, with a sound knowledge of their requirements and more anxious than anyone to be in their good books. I would like to reassure any of my Arab friends who may read this book. I do not think I did their cause any disservice by telling the British Government what they really thought; in any case, the British paid scant notice, and look where they are now (summer, 1967)!

If it would have been odd of SIS not to take advantage of my presence in the Middle East, it would have been odder still if the Soviet intelligence service had ignored me. One British journalist, shortly after my departure from Beirut, asked in print what use I could have been to the Soviet Union, and came to the astonishing conclusion that I was probably reporting on the Middle East College of Arabic Studies located in Shemlan in the hills above Beirut. With all due respect to that institution, which has achieved more notoriety than it really deserves, the most detailed information about it would have been considered by most intelligence services a poor return for seven years’ work.

The fact is that the Soviet Union is interested in a very wide range of Middle Eastern phenomena. Enjoying a wide margin of priority at the top of the list are the intentions of the United States and British governments in the area. For an assessment of such intentions, I was not too badly placed.
^*
One writer, discussing my case, commented on the fact that I seldom asked direct questions; I was the least curious of journalists. Of course! If you put direct questions on matters of substance to any American or British official you are apt to get either an evasion or a whopping great lie. But in the course of general conversation, discussion and argument, it is not impossible to get the drift of your interlocutor’s thinking or to estimate with fair accuracy his standing in respect of policy decisions.

It is difficult, though by no means impossible, for a journalist to obtain access to original documents. But these are often a snare and a delusion. Just because a document
is
a document, it has a glamour which tempts the reader to give it more weight than it deserves. This document from the United States Embassy in Amman, for example. Is it a first-rate draft, a second draft or the finished memorandum? Was it written by an official of standing, or by some dogsbody with a bright idea? Was it written with serious intent or just to enhance the writer’s reputation? Even if it is unmistakably a direct instruction to the United States Ambassador from the Secretary of State dated last Tuesday, is it still valid today? In short, documentary intelligence, to be really valuable, must come as a steady stream, embellished with an awful lot of explanatory annotation. An hour’s serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents. Of course, it is best to have both.

So, after seven years, I left Beirut and turned up in the Soviet Union. Why? Maybe I was tipped off by a Fourth Man. Maybe someone had blundered. It is even possible that I was just tired. Thirty years in the underground is a long stretch, and I cannot pretend that they left no mark. The question, as far as I am concerned, can be left to history; or rather, since history is unlikely to be interested, it can be buried right now.

But the treatment which my escape had received from various publicists calls for some comment, as an illustration of the bland invention which characterizes so much of current writing on secret service matters. The writer of an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
told a stirring story of Lebanese police surveillance of my activity, involving an American confectioner (a neat touch!), breakneck taxi rides and night photography. I do not know whether the writer had his tongue in his cheek; unless I misjudged him sadly, he is too intelligent to fall for such twaddle. A later author, John Bulloch, advanced the theory that the Lebanese deliberately let me go, in collusion with the British. His only support for the theory was the statement that the Lebanese security authorities were so “very
efficient” that I could not have got away without their knowledge. I am afraid that this betrays total ignorance of local conditions. Beirut is one of the liveliest centres of contraband and espionage in the world. Dozens of people make illegal crossings of the Lebanese frontiers monthly; only a few are brought to book.

Fantasies pursued me, of course, into the Soviet Union. Reports of my whereabouts have been bewilderingly various. I am living in Prague; I am living on the Black Sea Riviera; I am in a sanatorium suffering from a nervous breakdown. I am living in a
dacha
outside Moscow; I am in a big government house outside Moscow; I am hidden away in a provincial town. I accompanied the Soviet delegation to the abortive Afro-Asian Conference in 1955; I am working in a Soviet cultural institute at Bloudane, not far from Damascus. It is obvious that none of those who published such nonsense could really have believed it. But, if they were guessing, why such stupid guesses? The overwhelming balance of probability was always that I was living in Moscow and, like all the other millions of Muscovites, in a flat. Anyone who had hazarded such a trite guess would have guessed quite right.

I will conclude by mentioning a factor which has unnecessarily puzzled some Western commentators on my case. That was the liberal smokescreen behind which I concealed my real opinions. One writer who knew me in Beirut has stated that the liberal opinions I expressed in the Middle East were “certainly” my true ones. Another comment from a personal friend was that I could not have maintained such a consistently liberal-intellectual framework unless I had really believed in it. Both remarks are very flattering. The first duty of an underground worker is to perfect not only his cover story but also his cover personality. There is, of course, some excuse for the misconception about my views which I have just mentioned. By the time I reached the Middle East, I had more than twenty years’ experience behind me, including some testing years. Furthermore, I was baptized the hard way, in Nazi Germany and Fascist Spain, where a slip might have had consequences only describable as dire.

C
HRONOLOGY

^*
After leaving Cambridge a convinced Communist, Philby went to Vienna, where he joined in the struggle of the Austrian Socialists against the government. In Vienna in 1934 he married a Communist—Litzi Friedman
.

[The author’s footnotes are distinguished from those created by the 1968 publisher of
My Silent War
(some of which have been updated for this edition) by being printed in roman type.]

^*
Philby was covering up traces of his early enthusiasm for Communism; Burgess, who was also a member of this Fellowship, appears to have been doing exactly the same thing
.

^*
Secret Intelligence Service, formerly MI6, the British secret service department in charge of all secret intelligence work, both espionage and counter-espionage, on non-British soil
.

^*
Secret service department responsible for counter-espionage and security in Britain and in all British territory overseas
.

^*
Basil Liddell-Hart
, The Liddell-Hart Memoirs,
2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965)
.

^†
British army censorship relaxed as the war went on. During the phony war period, its mutton-headed restrictiveness compared unfavourably with the much-criticized practice of General Franco’s censors.