Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  Kim Philby’s career ought to tell us more about the Soviet intelligence service than we can learn from dozens of other individual cases because he has written a book which in spite of his omissions says a great deal. Professionally, one of the features of his Soviet espionage career seems to have been the rapport established at an early stage between service and agent, and maintained throughout; they appear to have been speaking the same language. I base this not on the rosy picture Kim paints of the KGB and its predecessors, as a band of high-minded philanthropic equals with never a cross word among them, but on the facts of the affair so far as they can be judged. How much of the credit for the relationship should go to one party and how much to the other is hard to say, as in a successful marriage. I suspect, however, that Kim often called the shots. Indeed it would be foolish to try to run an agent in his position without constantly deferring to his better judgement. With the exception of the Section IX job, the Russians generally seem to have left it to him to fashion his own SIS career – for example, to decide whether to accept or resist a posting. Even the intervention from Washington which helped to put London on Maclean’s track is represented as his own idea and made on his responsibility, although no doubt he cleared it with the Russians.

  I have tried in this book to correct some of the wilder estimates of Kim’s achievements for the Russians and damage to British interests, and to emphasise the difficulties and realities of running an agent in his position. But I do not seek, as some have, to make him out as less important and dangerous than he was. His place in the pantheon or rogues’ gallery of secret intelligence is secure.

  Notes

  1. The one-time pad cipher systems used by the KGB had been duplicated, defeating the purpose of the one-time pad, which, as the name suggests, should be used only once to encipher a message. When used properly, a one-time pad system cannot be deciphered. The duplication allowed US and British codebreakers to decipher KGB messages which indicated that the KGB had an agent in Washington code-named homer who had access to the secret messages between US President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. One message revealed that homer was able to visit his KGB contact in New York because his American-born wife was pregnant and staying with her mother in the city. That message confirmed the growing US and British suspicions that the KGB agent HOMER was Donald Maclean.

  2. This is particularly true since Burgess knew both of the two other members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, and both fell under suspicion as a direct result of his defection.

  † Editor’s note: Philby claimed in his 1963 confession to have recruited Burgess or Maclean as agents. This was not the case. But shortly after his own recruitment in 1934, he supplied his handler with a list of seven potential recruits he had known while a member of the Cambridge Socialist Union. Maclean’s was the first name on the list, Burgess’s the last.

  † Editor’s note: Alan Nunn May was a British scientist who passed details of the Anglo-US atomic weapons programme to Moscow in the 1940s.

  ‡ Editor’s note: Milne was writing in the 1970s before the public exposure of the other members of the so-called Cambridge Spy Ring, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross.

  12

  RETROSPECT

  ‘…The greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’

  – T. S. Eliot

  Eliot’s kind of treason will not fit Kim. Some might argue that he did the wrong deed for the right reason, that he was a misguided idealist; others, again, that the deed was so wrong that no reason for it could be right. But Kim regarded himself in a different light: not as an SIS officer who treasonably handed over its secrets to a foreign power, but as someone who boldly infiltrated the British secret service because it was the target he was best equipped to penetrate. Yet he must always have been perfectly aware that in doing so he had continually to betray a trust placed in him by his country, service, friends and family, and it is clear that at least in respect of the last two the conflict distressed him. How did it happen that this man of strong loyalties, especially personal ones, was prepared to put one alien abstract loyalty above all others? No one has convincingly answered this question, nor do I pretend to be able to do so, only to offer one or two personal impressions.

  I do not believe in the theory of Kim’s father as the dominating influence. The important thing about St John Philby in Kim’s life was not his presence but his absence. They were seldom under the same roof. While his father was in the Middle East, Kim was brought up in England by his grandmother and mother, by his prep school and public school, and by himself. As far as I know, apart from a visit when he was eleven Kim never saw the Middle East until after World War II, and his father usually spent no longer in England than he could help. Undoubtedly St John helped to implant in him a strong non-conformism and unwillingness to accept the accepted; but from there they each took quite different paths. Even at school Kim was very much his own master.

  Nor do I believe that his career should be seen as a lifelong expression of revenge, a means of working out a deep resentment against authority or the Establishment, however defined. Kim had no love for the values of his class, but though he might be contemptuous of them he was not embittered. The best way I can describe him at the time he went up to Cambridge is to fall back on a cliché: a rebel looking for a cause.

  His four years at university were spent in the search. He eventually found his cause in communism. It was not a merely emotional conversion, or it could not possibly have gone so deep or lasted so long. In oversimplified terms, it was a matter of the head, not the heart. I believe now that he was intellectually convinced, over a long period of reading and discussion, by the Marxian analysis of history and class struggle. (He says something like this in his book, but it should not be rejected on that account.) Whatever he may have said later for public consumption, he was not driven to communism by compassion for the sufferings of the poor and unemployed in Britain, or of Jews in Berlin or socialists in Vienna. Not that he was particularly lacking in compassion; rather he would always prefer to look at things in terms of historical process and analysis and political solution. This intellectual acceptance of communism was the turning point in his life.

  To become a communist is one thing; to remain a communist is quite another. He describes it thus:

  It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course.

  He decided ‘to stick it out, in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberrations of individuals, however enormous.’1 If we are to be convinced we need to know much more about this mental struggle, which he firmly places in the Baldwin–Chamberlain era. Was he really shaken at the time by what Stalin was doing? The period 1937–38 was one of the worst of the purge. Yet it was then that Kim unhesitatingly accepted the invitation to become an NKVD agent. Historically it has usually been some dramatic Soviet intervention in foreign affairs – the Nazi–Soviet pact, the invasion of Finland 1939, Czechoslovakia 1948, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 – that has caused wholesale desertions among the Western communist intelligentsia, rather than what has been going on inside the USSR. Many others have changed sides not because a god has failed them but because their own values and outlook have gradually altered. Kim’s brief account of this political development does not suggest that the foreign interventions had much if any effect on him, or that his personal values radically changed at any time after his acceptance of communism.

  The publishers of My Silent War have claimed that it tells why Kim became a Soviet agent. Unfortunately this is just what it does not do. The book touches on his reasons for becoming and remaining a communist, but contains no word to show why he chose to become a spy rather than pursue the aims of communism in any of a do
zen legitimate ways. Perhaps the choice was less remarkable in the mid-1930s than it would be today. Communism had a long conspiratorial history. While Kim may have been an intellectual convert, his study of that history had probably left him with a romantic admiration for the leaders of the Revolution and the secret lives they had led. The urgent task was to work against Nazism and fascism, and here was an immediate way of doing so. His escapades in Vienna would have given him a taste for the exciting underground life. And Kim possessed one useful psychological qualification for the life of a spy: from boyhood he had been accustomed to keeping his secrets to himself, and to shutting off the world from the inner keep.

  Once a man has been recruited as a Soviet agent he is usually reckoned to have entered a one-way street down which he must travel as long as the Russians wish. He is not allowed the luxury of changing his mind; he knows too much, his masters need his reports and he can easily be blackmailed by them. Was this unspoken threat, ultimately, what kept Kim a faithful Soviet spy?

  It is most unlikely. Kim had probably been an agent for a long time before he broke any British law. If during his first five years he had strongly wished to pull out it would have been difficult for the NKVD to exert really serious pressure on him (provided, of course, that he did not try to do so while in Germany or Spain, where they could readily have arranged trouble). The same is not true, I take it, of Maclean, who seems to have become a Soviet agent at about the time he joined the Foreign Office, and was probably spying against his country from the beginning. Kim had several years to reflect both on his career of espionage and on the political faith he had embraced. There is no real evidence that he ever chafed under either, or that Soviet pressure, however muted, had to be exercised on him. I think it more likely that, if he had any doubts, most of the drive to continue came from within himself. He had crossed two very broad Rubicons by his intellectual acceptance of communism and his choice of a conspiratorial career. A man of Kim’s pride and (to quote Graham Greene) ‘chilling certainty’2 of his own rightness could not recross either of these Rubicons without destroying something in himself.

  In that sense he was certainly an egotist. He now had a convinced purpose in life and must be allowed to pursue it regardless of the inconvenience or worse that it might bring to other people. To elevate one’s own principles above all other considerations can be a very strong form of egotism. But I do not think it correct to describe him, in Professor Trevor-Roper’s words, as totally, blindly egocentric, or to cite as evidence of this the fact that he never thought it necessary to offer Eleanor in Moscow any justification for landing her in such a situation. He could reasonably argue that she was fully aware before she married him that he had recently been accused, and officially cleared, of being the Third Man; and she had agreed to follow him to Moscow after the truth had been exposed. Kim, like thousands of other men, could certainly be ruthless with women. But what struck me most in Eleanor’s story was the unexpected weakness and indecision he showed over breaking with her.3 Although he was having an affair with Melinda Maclean, and although his marriage to Eleanor must by now have become a serious embarrassment in his relations with the KGB, he seemed unable to say the decisive words. Kim, the egotist, the admirer of ‘ruthless common sense’, was behaving like a human being who found it difficult to hurt other people.

  The idea of power was very important in Kim’s life, but I do not believe he had an overriding interest in power for himself. Dora Philby remarked bluntly to me in about 1936, ‘The trouble with you and Kim is that neither of you has any ambition.’ Whether she was right about me does not matter; anyway, she did not know me well. But Kim was her son. While her remark may have been partly directed at his apparent lack of success or purpose since leaving Cambridge, she was speaking of what she saw as an inborn characteristic. Kim’s life suggests that he was prepared to accept anything for the cause, from maximum subordination to maximum responsibility. Of course he would have enjoyed such measure of power as this gave him, as anyone might, but I do not see this as a mainspring. On the other hand, he was deeply impressed by the concept of power as a necessary basis for action or policy, on the largest or smallest scale. He had only contempt for a politician – or an intelligence officer – whose pretensions exceeded the power or resources available to him.

  What was Kim like, as a person? It is interesting that whereas the character sketches we have of Burgess and Maclean are detailed, convincing and reasonably consistent, nobody seems able to pin down Kim himself. Even those who knew him best probably all have different pictures. Most who have written about him tend to omit the rumbustiousness, the engaging irreverence towards established authority, the casual Bohemianism, the sociability, the preference for mildly earthy company and conversation. This was not usually the face he showed to his superiors in SIS or the ambassadors and counsellors of the Foreign Service. In more formal company there was a gravitas, combined with a certain diffidence and shyness to which his stammer no doubt contributed.

  I think those who knew him well were hardly aware of this stammer except when strangers were present, and one can only guess at the distress it must have caused him. Everyone who suffers from a handicap has a right to turn it to occasional advantage, and Kim consciously or unconsciously did so now and then, especially at conferences and committee meetings. Because it could be painful for him to speak, his interventions were rare and invariably short, well considered and received with respect: a lesson there for all of us committee men.

  Hugh Trevor-Roper puts his finger on an important point when he expresses doubts whether Kim ever engaged in intellectual discussion.4 It is true that he did not often talk about ideology, philosophy, history, literary appreciation, art and several other subjects. I am not sure, however, that it is correct to put this down to an atrophying of the mind imposed by acceptance of the communist dialectic. In some respects it preceded his conversion. Even as a schoolboy or undergraduate he had begun to lose interest in discussing a number of things including much of literature and art, though not music. He was easily bored by other people’s views. But as long as I knew him, he would come out with remarks which showed that if he had wanted he could perfectly easily have engaged in well-informed conversation on many things. It might, however, be true to say that one reason he avoided discussion was that there were so many subjects on which he could not express his real views.

  Trevor-Roper quotes a description of Kim in Istanbul after the war, as a voluptuary living a self-indulgent life of lotus-eating ease, and adds that in America his opulent way of life excited comment. Kim liked good food and drink, but most of the time he ate simple fare. Physical comfort never seemed to matter to him. I can testify that his life in Istanbul was a long way from sybaritic, and anyway he preferred roughing it in eastern Turkey. In the years just after the war, people coming out from rationed England and seeing plenty of meat and duty-free drink were often inclined to speak of self-indulgence in the Foreign Service. Trevor-Roper also describes Kim in Rickmansworth as living far above his retirement income of a few hundred a year, and implies that he was dependent on Russian subvention. I doubt this. It would have been extremely dangerous for him to accept much from the Russians – if indeed he had contact with them at the time – and I know that Aileen’s mother was giving help; he also had a job for part of the period. There was no luxury at all and not too much comfort at Rickmansworth; nor it seems in Beirut. In Moscow, to judge from Eleanor, he was plunged back into a life at least as austere as that of wartime St Albans, but I doubt if that particular change in his fortunes greatly bothered him.

  Kim kept much of himself to himself, but outside this protected inner sanctum he had a great need for company. He liked to have round him a small familiar circle of friends. Some might almost be described as cronies, one or two were there to be ribbed and joshed in a friendly way. But he also liked the stimulation provided, in their different styles, by such companions as Dick Brooman-White and Tommy Harris. Friendship was always important
to him. When he went to Moscow he gave up many things, but I should be surprised if he regretted any of his deprivations except that of his family and the people he knew best. He was sentimental about and very loyal to friends, even Guy, whom he didn’t really like. The relationship with Guy was equivocal: Kim was intrigued by his peculiar mentality and character, but I had the impression even from early days that Guy was a mysterious cross he had to bear. I put this down to the undoubted fact that Kim could never refuse anything to an old friend. This was certainly part of the reason, but one now sees that he could not completely get away from Guy, for whose introduction into Soviet intelligence he had apparently been responsible, a situation which Guy was probably not above exploiting.

  Kim has said in an interview that if he had his time over again he would do the same thing. I wish that were not true, but I do not doubt he meant it. But I do not regret knowing him. He enriched my world for many years and I owed a lot to him. Certainly my association with him caused many difficulties for me but I do not feel bitterness towards him, only sadness. ‘Corruptis optimis pessima.’† Let me leave it at that.

  Notes