Philby for Foreign Secretary?
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista BY RAY ALAN Philby for Foreign Secretary? MOLESKIN IS again in fashion around the watering holes of Britain's senior civil servants and journalists following speculation that a...
...Educated Saudi officers, particularly men of the type needed to operate the awacs, tend increasingly to be radicals hostile to the royal family and its foreign protectors...
...Among genuine Scotsmen and Irishmen, the word "Saxon"-in the local dialects-is considered something of an insult...
...British journalists have less freedom than their American colleagues to investigate administrative scandals and intelligence snafus...
...Better silence than scandal" and "Better long-distance scandal than dirty linen in London" have been the British secret services' mottoes in more than one such affair, especially when the fallen brethren have been members of the " old boy network...
...the Anglicans (2 million registered members, 1.2 million churchgoers...
...I have referred to this little-known substratum of Mideast politics in my novel The Beirut Pipeline(Fairai, Straus and Giroux) and elsewhere...
...Yet I have seen it applied in American papers to people who claim Scots or Irish ancestry-A nonsense because the Anglo-Saxons never conquered Scotland or Ireland...
...Moreover, most English-folk are not committed Protestants nowadays, and many of them are black or brown...
...What's a convenient label for White-and-Brown Anglo-Irish Agnostics-Christians-and-Moslems...
...and the Moslems (nearly 2 million members claimed, about 700,000 male mosque-goers?women are not counted), mostly of Asian origin...
...THE INFLUENCE of Kim Philby and his friends and dupes on British policy in the Middle East has been underrated, mainly because he was overtly concerned with the region for only a short period...
...I have always thought it a silly, unnecessarily divisive label...
...Twelve years earlier, two defecting diplomats associated with him, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, were similarly permitted to get away...
...England's biggest religious communities are the Catholics (claiming 3.5 million adult members, 1.3 regular churchgoers), very many of whom are of Irish origin...
...Merely to pronounce its name is to recall the chuckle of its mountain streams and the laughter of its children...
...During the last month...
...An idea of how unwASPish the English are can be gleaned from a survey of religious observance published by the Bible Society...
...When the rainy season started you had to climb up onto the roof and push a heavy stone roller around in order to seal the cracks that the summer sun had etched into the clay...
...Brezhnev, Philby and Quad-dafi would add that the West must be denied the only sure foothold it would have in the Mideast in the event of amajor regional crisis: Israel...
...Old stuff...
...Passing through Spain in April, I heard the country's abject government-dominated TV service report the Zahle fighting in just one sentence, all of it fiction: "Israeli-backed Christian militiamen have attacked the Lebanese Army, and Syrian troops of the Arab peace force are trying to restore order...
...Small, mainly Protestant, churches have some 600,000 members, and English Jews total about 400,000...
...Fortunately, enough people over here know that Celts and Normans were at least as important as Saxons in the British mix...
...Air Force is flying...
...Shouldn't someone in Washington tell the President the facts of Arab life...
...the Soviet-supplied Army of the Syrian dictator Hafez el-Assad, helped by Palestinian and other guerrilla groups equipped with new Russian rocket-launchers, have been reducing the to wn to rubble...
...Is the Reagan Administration about to oblige them?in the interests of detente or computer exports or something...
...Wasp buzzed briefly into England a few years ago as a constituent of the local version of the American way of life, but was soon swatted...
...Sir Roger Hollis fell under suspicion in the mid-1960s and died in 1973, yet it was not until 1979 that a cautious hint of the affair appeared in the press...
...You got quite soaked, of course, but it did not make any difference: There was always plenty of arak and a wood fire waiting to help ward off a chill...
...This can be achieved by allowing the PLO to take over Jordan and destabilize Israel from guerrilla bases in the so-called West Bank, and by goading Egypt into resuming operations against Israel...
...In recent weeks, Moscow's allies have battered the Lebanese Christians, guilty of pro-Western sympathies as well as opposition to the Syrian-Palestinian-Leftist-Islamic alliance...
...Corruption and/or politics will ensure the same fate for the secrets of the awacs planes Washington proposes to supply to Saudi Arabia-more advanced, even, than those the U.S...
...Philbyite influence persuaded Mideast specialists in the FO to adopt an almost Stalinist view of diplomacy-subordinating it to propagandist needs, for example, or exploiting it to discredit democratic parties that sought a middle way between disintegrating traditionalism and Leftish extremism...
...The Kremlin has been working to deprive the West of its surest foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean for more than a quarter of a century...
...a fuller story-by Chapman Pincher, a veteran Whitehall-watcher-was published only a few weeks ago...
...They are so mistrusted by many princes that the Saudi government is calling in Pakistani military units to guard royal palaces and vital installations...
...This was to be expected, given Spain's craven fear of the least Arab pressure, but even the BBC described the attackers as " the Arab peacekeeping force...
...Soon, with the help of Lord Carrington and whatever nitwits he can recruit in the EEC and Washington, they can have another try at wearing down Israel...
...The British sold Arab rulers some relatively advanced military hardware in the 1950s and '60s, only to learn that it soon fell into Soviet hands as a result of either corruption or political change...
...They lived in solid stone houses, many of which had flat timber roofs covered with clay...
...Today many of Zahle's people live in ruins or are fleeing over the mountains toward the coast...
...In his day there was more interaction between the SIS and the Foreign Office (FO) than there is now...
...Ultimately, official cover became an unofficial cover for undermining Britain's interests and proteges...
...but for me, as for most other students of Middle Eastern affairs, it is now history...
...AMERICA'S awacs-fitted aircraft are equipped with some of the world's most sophisticated radar and aerial surveillance gadgetry...
...2) So have hangers-on of major oil producers...
...When I was last there, its inhabitants were hospitable, cooked superb food and distilled what was probably the world's best arak...
...Less than one-fifth of the total adult population of England and Wales claim membership of a Christian church, and only one-tenth attend a church regularly...
...I was told at SIS headquarters when I protested about the pro-Soviet, anti-Western output of a propaganda unit...
...They are hemmed in by tough libel laws, "D" notices ("Lay off warnings from the Defense Ministry) and Official Secrets acts which conceal far more information from Parliament, the press and the public than from the Russians .The investigator who lacks political backing may find it advisable to wait until the baddie is dead, or has left for Moscow, before denouncing him...
...3) If you are both a Soviet protege and the stipendiary of one or more oil moguls, the horizon is the limit: Make a desert and the world will call it peace...
...But it's marvelous cover...
...Upper-class Englishmen are proud of their Norman origins...
...This is the third or fourth mole story to make headlines in Britain in less than a year, and there are rumors that yet another of the industrious creatures may before long be uncovered...
...The lessons the assault on Zahle and other Westward-leaning Christian communities is teaching the peoples of the region are these: (1) Protegesof theSoviet Union have a lot of privileges...
...MOLESKIN IS again in fashion around the watering holes of Britain's senior civil servants and journalists following speculation that a former director of the British Security Service, Sir Roger Hollis, may for 30 years have been a Soviet spy...
...Offshoots of the SIS and FO (the "Middle East Office, " "Arab News Agency," "Near East Association" and others) became bases for activity and propaganda that helped the Soviet Union and sniped at the United States...
...The West has reacted with shrugs and cynicism...
...THAT UGLY American acronym wasp seems to be going out of circulation...
...In the view of Brezhnev, Carrington and Qaddafi-And Philby-israel is the main problem in the region, the PLO must be recognized, and the American-sponsored Camp David peace agreement must be scrapped, meaning sabotaged...
...Although the Security Service officers investigating Philby were convinced he was working for the Soviets long before his disappearance, he was allowed to "escape...
...One scandal-ridden Leftist-infiltrated SIS organization -headed by a Left-wing oddball whose previous post had been in Moscow-Actually revolted against its London bosses at a crucial moment in Anglo-Arab relations...
...Logically, it should refer only to white Protestants whose forebears lived in England or northern Germany...
...Nothing to do with the report from Moscow that Leonid Brezhnev and Libya's Colonel Muammar Qaddafi agree with the Mideast analysis that Lord Carring-ton, the British Foreign Secretary, and his officials are trying to foist onto the European Economic Community (EEC) and the United States...
...Several months before Kim Philby, a senior officer of both the KGB and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), departed for Moscow in 1963, an American magazine editor I know was warned by a British journalist he had consulted about the risks of employing Philby as a correspondent, but nothing of what the journalist said could have been published...
...Nothing to do with the report that has just landed on my desk-from a source close to British officialdom?alleging that the CIA and Israel's Mos-sad are cooperating in bugging friendly and neutral embassies and UN offices...
...Or should we perhaps be saying: "Congratulations, Kim...
...Old stuff...
...I ADMIT to being biased in favor of Zahle, the besieged Christian town in central Lebanon...
...The Russians would love to have a look at it...
...King Abdullah of Jordan, for instance, was murdered by a strongly anti-British employee of a covert FO subsidiary...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 11
