The Fourth Man: The Definitive Account of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean and Who Recruited Them to Spy for Russia
Muggeridge, Malcolm
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Fourth Man: The Definitive Account of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean and Who Recruited Them to Spy for Russia" with the malfunctions of economic life caused by the advice of economists themselves. An important branch of this new study would examine the results of prices and incomes policies. On...
...Just as a nun who in her unregenerate days had been in the chorus of the Folies Berg~re is likely to seem, in the eyes of her fellow nuns, a potential Pavlova, so Philby, having been an authentic Times correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, was seen by his SIS colleagues as liable at any moment to be offered the editorial chair...
...In terms of these wider issues, Galbraith's speculations look helplessly to the past rather than probingly into the...
...She would receive, she writes in her excellent little book, The Spy I Loved, in a single morning numerous short loving messages written on tiny pieces of very thin paper, with instructions either to burn them, carefully dispersing the ash, or to swallow them...
...Air mail rates sent on request...
...One thing is certain: Our trio of traitors could b y no stretch of the 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 imagination be regarded as downtrodden and oppressed, or even--in the unlovely jargon of our time--as underprivileged...
...Bedroom doors opened and shut, strange faces appeared and disappeared down the stairs where they passed new visitors on their way up...
...One imagines the officers checking their lists and saluting smartly when the grisly transaction was completed...
...I t was tempting to imagine that such overlooking of his unseemly behavior could only be accounted for on the supposition that he enjoyed some special protection among his superiors, A simpler and more plausible explanation is that a ruling class on the run, such as we have had for some decades now, is bound to make every sort of mistake in its obsessive efforts to demonstrate that it has none of the traits of a ruling class...
...He, too, was chronically extravagant, and liable to be impecunious, but he managed to tap a variety of sources...
...He foresaw the coming of collectivism, and Nietzsche found in Burckhardt an historian who "'was not dominated by the general whims and dared to see things realistically...
...Only in the great prophetic voice of Dostoevsky have I seemed to find a satisfying elucidation...
...On one side of him he was an aspiring ambassador, and well on the way to becoming one...
...The subsequent disclosure of the identity of Anthony Blunt has caused a great hullabaloo, but it in no way alters the essential pattern of events as conveyed by Boyle...
...Bein-g ~ extravagant, self-indulgent, and generous, he was also ever in need of money...
...He was hobbling about with his leg in a cast, walking wounded as a result of a round of debauches while en poste, including urinating in public at a diplomatic reception--an escapade which I supposed not to be conducive to a successful diplomatic career...
...Burgess, too, despite his deplorable ways, was regarded as a fascinating, brilliant, wayward creature...
...The Keynesian adventure of the last haft-century has thus dissolved into a series of intractable economic problems for which the only solution seems to be an evasive kind of uplift...
...T h i s strange coming together of the forces of liberal dissolution and Marxist authoritarianism is something I have pondered over ever since...
...Not one of them could rustle up any sort of hard-luck story of proletarian traces, though Philby's atrocious stutter might perhaps be regarded as a serious disability...
...Then there was the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...the future Keeper of the Queen's pictures, Anthony Blunt...
...Maclean is the most difficult of the three to fathom--or maybe there is nothing to fathom...
...No one predicted the modern totalitarian state more accurately"~Reinhold Niebuhr in The Nation...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Please enter a [] new [] renewal subscription to The American Spectator for: [ ] 12 issues for $12 [ ] Best offer: 36 issues for only $30 [ ] Payment enclosed [ ] Bill me later PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip Canadian and foreign subscribers, please add $2 per year for postage...
...and Professor"Sage" Bernal, over whom so ma@ female hearts yearned...
...F o r me, the link between the two books was the flat in Bentinck Street belonging to Lord Rothschild where Burgess and his friends congregated during the London blitz...
...I see him as essentially a sort of Etonian mudlark: mischievous, disgusting, but with no serious ideological preoccupations...
...On this question there is, of course, an abundance of evidence, because Galbraith is far from being the solitary crusader for such nostrmaas that he pretends to be...
...The young one, in a wild outburst addressed to the sinister Stavrogin, lets the cat out of the bag...
...We are thus in a position to study the scarcities and distortions of supply created by schemes of price control The housing market in many countries is an excellent example...
...As they say in the courts, the case is now closed, and as far as the relevant facts are concerned, I cannot see that it will ever need to be reopened...
...Then the turmoil would begin...
...It seemed, after the company I'd left in Bentinck Street, a sort of wonderful purification: the dive in ice-cold water after a sauna...
...Please allow four fo six weeks for delivery...
...It should be remembered that intelligence organizations, by the nature of the case, are very cut off from the outside world, in this being rather like a.convent or monastery, though on the Beelzebub side, naturally...
...I well remember encountering him at the Travellers' Club soon after his return from a trip to Cairo...
...After all, when they joined up, the purges had already taken place...
...Now we really do know just what happened, how it happened, and who was concerned in its happening...
...whereas a sometime headmaster of Eton told me that if at any point he had been asked about Burgess's suitability for this or that post, he would have answered that his record at Eton was such that he must be considered unsuitable for any responsible job in Llberty/ ss Ld rtyC/ass Reflections on History By Jacob Burckhardt Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss historian and humanist, was a friend of liberty and a skepticof power...
...Hardcover $9,00...
...Old Verkhovensky, a sort of male impersonation of Eleanor Roosevelt, is magnificently and hilariously portrayed...
...We pay postage, but require prepayment, on orders from individuals...
...There remains the question--unanswerable, but inviting endless speculation and theorizing--of motivation, not by any means the same in each case Thus, Philby, I should say, as a great adulator of his father, St...
...Not even the harsh treatment of homosexuals in the USSR--which lost the regime Gide's support, for what it was worth--troubled Maclean and Burgess, both ardent practitioners, any more than the rigorously puritanical mores that came in as the Old Bolsheviks went out (via an execution squad) abated Philby's zeal in spying for the KGB...
...Maclean seems to have enjoyed a like immunity...
...I had occasion to drop in myself one evening, and there they all were-Burgess himself...
...As a free-lance spy, he was most successful in Paris, where a fellow pederast, Edouard Pfeiffer, who happened to b e t h e then Prime Minister Daladier' s chef-de- Cabinet, provided him with useful information relating to French politics and politicians, which, suitably processed, could be fed to all his diverse clients...
...his Soviet spymaster appears to have been fairly lavish, but exigent...
...X91 Stalin and the Red Flag to the greater glory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the most brutal, bloody, and comprehensive tyranny ever to exist in the world...
...Burgess's heroes were Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, who will scarcely have measured up, or down, to Stalin...
...though it must be said that a ministerial colleague, Christopher Mayhew, declining to accept Burgess onto his staff, correctly described him as a "dirty, disreputable and idle good-for-nothing...
...First translated into English in 1943, R~flections on Histom" was previously published in the United States under the title Force and Freedom...
...especially in his novel The Devils, in which he anatomizes with extraordinary prescience the transformation of the Liberal Man, Stepan Verkhovensky, into th e Revolutionary Man, his son Peter Verkhovensky--as it were, Hegel into Nietzsche, Walt Whitman into Karl Marx, Eleanor Roosevelt into the destroyers of President Nixon...
...THE FOURTH MAN: THE DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT OF KIM PHILBY, GUY BURGESS, AND DONALD MACLEAN AND WHO RECRUITED THEM TO SPY FOR RUSSIA Andrew Boyle / The Dial Press / 111.95 Malcolm Muggeridge When Andrew Boyle told me that he was proposing to write yet another book on the Philby-Maclean-Burgess affair, it seemed to me like a crazy undertaking...
...As I walked back afterwards to Hammersmith, where I was then stationed, the blitz was in full swing--searchlights, ack-ack, explosions, incendiaries, and the lurid light of the fires they caused...
...Like the housemaid who was only " a little bit pregnant," the problem has grown and grown until we face unpleasant alternatives whichever way we go...
...At one point he was in receipt of salaries or retainers from SIS, the KGB, a Rothschild, and--most miraculous of all-Sir Joseph Ball, Neville Chamberlain's intelligence factotum...
...Malcolm Muggeridge is working on t~e third volume of /sis autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...I strongly recommend The Devils as a follow-up read to The Fourth Man...
...civil servants, politicians, visitors to London, friends and colleagues of Guy's popped in and out of bed, and then continued some absorbing discussion of political intrigue, the progress of the war and the future possibilities of the peace...
...Burgess, particularly, appears to have dazzled some of his BBC and Foreign Office bosses to the point of their losing their wits: notably Hector McNeil (to his subsequent great distress) when he was Minister of State at the Foreign Office in the Attlee government...
...one after the other, the artificers of the Russian Revolution had been induced to declare themselves its inveterate enemies and betrayers, and then were executed, the exception being Trotsky, who escaped only to be struck down in distant Mexico in due course...
...In English terms, he might in the thirties have been a 'Master of Balliol or a Director of the Spoken Word at the BBC...
...If someone like myself, with special reasons for being interested--I had worked under Philby in MI6, the wartime version of the secret service, or SIS, had been in some sort of contact with several of the other characters involved, and was generally familiar with the intelligence scene did not feel that another presentation was bearable, how could the book be expected to attract general readers ? When, however, The Fourth Man came into my hands, I found it compulsive reading...
...As a collector of intelligence, he was adroit, though an inveterate liar--which, in fact, they nearly all are...
...Such bureaucratic regulation is a slope, and at the bottom we i n - evitably find ourselves faced with a degree of coercion generally found unacceptable in liberal societies...
...It was a signal mark of appreciation for his and Burgess's services that, when they became residents in the USSR, the KGB provided them with appropriate bedfellows of the requisite sex...
...On all of these difficult questions--both in economics and in the wider fields of human endeavor-we are only at the beginning of what must become a much more profound understanding of the relation between our choices and the world we inhabit...
...It is true that two other major participants in the PhilbyMaclean-Burgess affair remain hidden in the book behind their intelligence pseudonyms...
...Economists the world over have given themselves up to this kind of regulation with vast enthusiasm...
...Surely, I thought, if ever a subject had been explored and expounded to the point of exhaustion, it was this one...
...A30 lndiamlpolis, Indiana 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 31 any sphere...
...There opportun, its in America...
...on another side, a tiresome, quarrelsome drunk and pervert...
...twice a week, briefcase in hand, he went by train from Washington to New York, there to copy out in his neat handwriting atomic data for transmission to his KGB bosses...
...Goronwy Rees gives an excellent description of the flat and its habiturs in his book, A Chapter of Aavidents: The effect was rather like watching a French farce which had been injected with all the elements of a political drama...
...The advice Galbraith offers with vast self-confidence is for government to take over the system, a remedy already tried in many countries and usually abandoned in disorder...
...Through his years of employment at the BBC, the Foreign Office, and SIS, he managed to get by despite unreliability, subversive talk, motoring offenses, and scandalous behavior generally...
...As a spy, he was as systematic and reliable as in carrying out his diplomatic ,duties...
...We are also' in a position to examine the consequences of well-intentioned interference with income levels--the rage, for example, induced among skilled workers by interference with their differentials...
...These relations are very complicated, since we cannot merely return to the same self-regulating economy of the last century, any more than the human organism can revert to what it was under the condition of earlier centuries...
...One episode, when cooperation between Hitler and Stalin under the pact was particularly close, has always seemed to me the ultimate in betrayal, ruthlessness, and cynicism...
...A guided tour throu,,h~ the history of civilization"--Satur&tv Review qf'Literature...
...As a young journalist in Moscow, I observed with amazement the strange antics and extraordinary credulity displayed by the liberal elite of the Western world in its servile adulation of Stalin and the Soviet regime--as though butchers should suddenly embark upon a passionate and uncritical espousal of vegetarianism...
...future...
...John Philby, the Arabist, was on the lookout for an equivalent hero to his father's, King Ibn Saud, and~ght he had found one in Stalin...
...Four years after this traffic first began to show on intercepts, t h e decision was taken to pounce on him, thereby precipitating his departure to Moscow...
...Thus, in order not to appear as stuffed shirts, as stand-offish and censorious, members of the ruling class affect a tolerance that even a Bertrand Russell might find excessive, and go out of their way to dissociate themselves from the qualities --such as loyalty, decency, truthfulness, and integrity--once seen as justifying the privileges they enjoyed...
...Patient research and investigation, skillful questioning, good sense, and some lucky encounters have enabled Boyle at last to fit together all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle convincingly...
...One or two generations of vice are absolutely necessary," Peter Verkhovensky tells him, surveying the revolutionary prospects, "monstrous, disgusting vice which turns Man into an abject, cowardly wretch --that's what we want...
...It took place at the Brest-Litovsk Bridge, where KGB officers handed over to their Gestapo opposite numbers German-Jewish Communists who had sought asylum in the USSR, receiving in return Ukrainian and other dissidents who had taken refuge in Germany...
...The most recent case is Great Britain...
...With an introduction by Gottfried Dietze...
...Galbraith talks of this job as "contentious," but to judge by the experience of some countries, "murderous" would be a better adjective...
...Such episodes--and there were many others of a like nature--apparently did not shake our trio's fidelity to Stalin and endeavor to further his purposes...
...Certainly, it prevented him from serving in the war as a fighting soldier, which he purportedly felt as a deprivation...
...3% order this book, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPt'ess/LibertyChtssir 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...And on top of it, a little fresh blood so that we may get accustomed to it...
...A plan of merely limited interference with the workings of the market has proved unstable...
...All three, in their professional lives, met with kindness, consideration, and more tolerance than was expedient...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980...
...The basic question that arises in Boyle's book--and it is a basic question of our time--is how it happened that these pampered children of the establishment, these libertine liberals begotten by Cadbury's News Cbronide out of Kingsley Martin's New Statesman, these ardent believers in universal suffrage democracy and opponents of war and capital punishment, came to enlist under THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR P.O...
...As for socialism-what does it amount to...
...No one, however, ever did ask him, and to the best of his knowledge whatever screening of Burgess may have taken place did not include questions addressed to his old school...
...It has destroyed the old forces, but has not put any new ones in their place...
...Even after all these years I have to admit that in some degree the mystery remains--how the devotees of freedom make straight the way to the Gulag Archipelago...
...Softcovcr $4.00...
...Perhaps engagement in intelligence activities softens the best of brains, as is suggested by the account given by Philby's third wife, Eleanor, an American lady acquired in Beirut, of how he courted her...
...Nor did I detect in any of the communications I received from Philby, or in conversations I at different times had with him, intimations of his alleged brilliance...
...They were all three scions of an upper-class, comfortablyoff elite, and educated at reputable public schools--Burgess at Eton, Maclean at Gresham's School, Holt, and Philby at Westminster--followed by Cambridge...
...The same sort of thing has been done for the Hiss case in America by Allen Weinstein's book, Perjury...
...the future Minister of War, John Strachey...
...On the contrary, I heard shortly afterwards that he had been put in charge of the American desk at the Foreign Office...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
