My Silent War

by Kim Philby

  The incident was indeed closed, and remained so for more than seven years. The press dropped me like a hot brick. In the light of subsequent events, it is easy to blame Macmillan, and through him the Government, for giving me a clean bill of health. But the blame lies elsewhere. No one in the Government, and particularly no one in the security service, wanted to make a public statement as early as 1955. The evidence was inconclusive; they could not charge me and did not want to clear me. They were forced to take action by the ill-informed hullabaloo in the popular press and by the silly blunder of Marcus Lipton.

  For this monumental fiasco, the Beaverbrook press bears a particularly heavy responsibility. It started the running and kept it up, blundering but relentless, in pursuance of Beaverbrook’s stupid feud with Eden and the Foreign Office. It would be interesting to compare the overseas expenditure of the Foreign Service with the money squandered by the Daily Express in the acquisition of irrelevant snippets of information about the Burgess-Maclean case. But “it is an ill wind turns none to good.” I have Beaverbrook’s quirk to thank for seven years of decent livelihood, in the nick of time, and of further service to the Soviet cause.

  EPILOGUE: HOME AND DRY

  My experiences in the Middle East from 1956 to 1963 do not lend themselves readily to narrative form except as part of the general history of the region during that period. That would be quite a different book. But there has been much speculation about what I was doing there in addition to my work as a newspaper correspondent, and it would be unfair to the reader to leave him guessing in total darkness. At the same time, I am inhibited by the fact that I am now speaking of very recent times. If the British Government can use the fifty-year rule to suppress the publication of official documents, I can also claim the right to veil in decent discretion events that took place as little as ten or five years ago. I will therefore content myself with a few hints at the truth, adjuring the reader only not to fall flat on his face into trape of his own making. Life can be quite simple. The compelling reason for discussion at this point is that, while the British and American special services can reconstruct pretty accurately my activities up to 1955, there is positive and negative evidence that they know nothing about my subsequent career in Soviet service.

  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 mor
e 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.

  * In 1963, in the House of Commons, Mr. Heath said that “since Mr. Philby resigned from the Foreign Service in July 1951 he has not had any access to any kind of official information. For the past seven years he has been living outside British legal jurisdiction.”

  CHRONOLOGY

  1912 Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby born on 1 January in Amballa, India, son of Harry St. John Philby, an Indian Civil Service officer who later became a renowned Arabist and converted Muslim, and Dora Philby.

  1925 Philby goes to Westminster School.

  1929 Enters Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of seventeen and joins the Cambridge University Socialist Society.

  1930 Guy Burgess arrives at Trinity from Eton.

  1931 Defeat of the Labour Government. Philby becomes a more ardent Socialist.

  1932 Becomes Treasurer of the Cambridge University Socialist Society.

  1933 Leaves Cambridge a convinced Communist with a degree in Economics, then goes to Vienna, where Chancellor Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss is preparing the first “putsch” in February 1934. Philby becomes a Soviet agent.

  1934 Clash between the Government and the Socialists in Vienna. On 24 February Philby marries Alice (Litzi) Friedman; then in May, after the collapse of the Socialist movement in Vienna, he returns with his wife to England. He begins work as a sub-editor on the Liberal monthly Review of Reviews, and joins the Anglo-German Fellowship of which Burgess is also a member—its pro-Hitler magazine, supported by Nazi funds, was edited by Philby. To cover up his Communist background he also makes repeated visits to Berlin for talks with the German Propaganda Ministry and with von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office.

  1937 In February he arrives in Spain to report the Civil War from Franco’s side. In July he becomes correspondent of The Times with Franco’s forces.

  1938 Awarded the “Red Cross of Military Merit” by Franco personally.

  1939 In July leaves Spain and becomes war correspondent of The Times at the British headquarters in Arras.

  1940 In June, after the evacuation of British forces from the Continent, he returns to England. Recruited by the British Secret Service and attached to SIS under Guy Burgess in Section D. Assigned to school for undercover work at Brickendonbury Hall, near Hertford, but on its being disbanded transferred to Special Operations in London and assigned to the teaching staff of a new school for general training in techniques of sabotage and subversion at Beaulieu, Hampshire.

  1941 Transferred to SIS, Section V, under Major Cowgill. Philby was put in charge of the Iberian sub-section, responsible for British intelligence in Spain and Portugal.

  1942 Marries his second wife, Aileen Furse. OSS party under Norman Pearson arrives in London for liaison with British Secret Service. Philby’s area of responsibility is extended to include North Africa and Italian espionage under newly formed counter-intelligence units.

  1943 Section V moves from St. Albans to London.

  1944 Appointed head of a newly created section (Section IX) designed to operate against Communism and the Soviet Union.

  1945 The Volkov incident. Philby’s position is seriously threatened by a Russian agent who offers to “talk.”

  1946 Takes a “field” appointment—officially to be First Secretary with the British Embassy in Turkey, actually to be head of the Turkish SIS station.

  1949 Becomes SIS representative in Washington, as top British Secret Service officer working in liaison with the CIA and FBI. He sits in on Special Policy Committee directing the ill-fated Anglo-U.S. attempt to infiltrate anti-Communist agents into Albania to topple the Enver Hoxha regime.

  1950 Guy Burgess arrives in Washington on assignment as Second Secretary of the British Embassy, and Philby invites him to stay at his house on Nebraska Avenue.

  1951 Philby is informed of the tightening net of suspicion surrounding Foreign Office diplomat and Soviet agent Donald Maclean, whose British Embassy position in Washington at the end of the war had placed him on the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Energy as its British joint secretary. Burgess is removed by Ambassador Franks and returns to England; then, on 25 May, Burgess and Maclean disappear from England, having escaped, via the Baltic, to Russia. Philby is summoned to London for interrogation and asked to resign from Foreign Service.

  1952 In the summer the famous “Secret Trial” takes place, when Philby is questioned by Milmo.

  1955 Government White Paper on the Burgess-Maclean affair. On 25 October in the House of Commons, Marcus Lipton asks about the Third Man, Philby. Harold Macmillan states that there is no evidence of Philby having betrayed the interests of Britain. Nevertheless he is dismissed from the Foreign Service because of his association with Burgess.

  1956 In September he goes to Beirut as correspondent of the Observer and the Economist; most likely he is still employed by SIS. But that year Dick White, who suspects Philby of being a Soviet agent, becomes head of SIS.

  1957 Aileen, Philby’s second wife, dies.

  1958 He marries Eleanor Brewer.

  1962 George Blake is caught. Philby is now known to be a Soviet agent.

  1963 On the night of 23 January Philby disappears in Beirut. The Soviet Union announces that Philby has been granted political asylum in Moscow. On 3 March, Mrs. Philby receives a cable from Philby postmarked Cairo. On 3 June Izvestia reports that Philby is with the Imam of Yemen. On 1 July, the British Government discloses that Philby is now known to have been a Soviet agent before 1946 and to have been the Third Man.

  1965 Awarded the Soviet Union’s “Red Banner Order,” one of the highest honours bestowed by the USSR.

  Footnotes

  Introduction

  * 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.

  Chapter I

  * 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.

  ‡ Before and after the war, a don at King’s College, Cambridge.

  * Burgess and Philby were both at Trinity College, Cambridge. Burgess had been in Section D of SIS since January 1939.

  * This thought was put into my head by my Soviet contact. My first factual reports on the secret service inclined him seriously to the view that I had got into the wrong organization.

  † Section D, under Grand, was set up in March 1938.

  * To sever his connection with The Times in July 1940, just before he joined SIS, Philby put out the story that he was being taken on by Lord Gort, Commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), to write up the official records of the campaign. This story is confirmed in a letter written by Ralph Deakin in 1944: “Lord Gort became so well-disposed to Philby that he took him away from The Times to do work on the record of the Expeditionary force before Dunkirk.”

  * In D Department of SIS. Later Chief Security Officer in Ankar
a Embassy when Philby went to Istanbul in 1947.

  † In his excellent Baker Street Irregular, Colonel Sweet-Escott erroneously locates the first training school at Aston House. Aston was an explosives depot run by a Commander Langley, RN.

  * He had been with Bruce Lockbart, one of the British secret agents in Russia after the Revolution of 1917; also a friend of Sidney Reilly who had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky. During the Second World War he occupied a high post in SOE, and was sent to Moscow by Churchill as SOE/SIS representative.

  >† Special Operations Executive, formed under Churchill’s orders in 1940 to assume all responsibility for undercover action against the Axis, especially sabotage and subversion. See Chapter II.

  ‡ Director of Military Intelligence.

  * He paid for the education of at least one of Philby’s children; he also suggested to André Deutsch, the publisher, that Philby might write an account of his career, but Philby waited until after he arrived in Moscow.

  * He made a fortune early in life as a partner in the merchant firm of Symons, Barlow & Co. in Bombay. While working for SIS be became Conservative MP for Stroud.

  † In 1939 he was Assistant to the Head of Military Intelligence Department of the War Office—MI/R (Military Intelligence/Research).

  Chapter II

  * Known as “Quex.” Director of Naval Intelligence until 1921. Head of SIS from 1936 until his death in November 1939.