That Old Spy Nerwork
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista BY RAY ALAN That Old Spy Network HAMLET was a great lad for half-truths. Conscience doth not make cowards of us all; it can inspire courage, even in villains. After World War II,...
...And a CIA department chief blamed Philby for the betrayal of an American-backed landing in Albania (a British unit in Cyprus was also under suspicion...
...Later, a senior U.S...
...Another, a translator, had worked in an "Arab" (in fact British) propaganda service whose output was anti-Israeli and anti-American and supported, he said, "some of the most nauseating elements in the Mideast...
...Soon he was "handling" Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross...
...Goats...
...to join our side in a doubtful, dangerous, thankless endeavor...
...Philby recalled in My Silent War that he consulted the embassy security officer who asked: "What does he mean by worse...
...And, one might add, the lives of an incalculable number of Jews and others whose liberation from Nazi concentration camps was delayed...
...Even Modin, a brave and dedicated man, considered himself a bureaucrat...
...Was this why Angle-ton gave Philby so much information about the CIA...
...Secret Service irresponsibility had by then become an industry...
...The Cambridge Keeper SPIES, like circus animals, usually have handlers...
...The most detailed I have read is Anthony Cave Brown's new book, Treason in the Blood (Houghton Mifflin, 677 pp., $29.95...
...Too many people died because of him—not only Allied agents he betrayed but Allied and German soldiers forced to go on killing each other after Hitler had clearly lost the War, since Stalin feared the West might make a last-minute deal with the Nazis and join them in an assault on Russia...
...He reported the Spanish Civil War from Franco's side, and entered the pro-Nazi sector of upper-class London society...
...From 1956 to 1963 he worked for it (and for the KGB, of course) in Beirut...
...The rise of fascism persuaded him, like many Europeans, that a better world could only be built in alliance with the new "socialist" society in Russia...
...Modin notes, for example, that Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime Prime Minister, described Burgess as a "clever chap whose judgment could be relied on...
...Cave Brown estimates that Phil-by's tactics lengthened the War by eight months and cost the lives of thousands of German anti-Nazis who were "the remnants of the intellectual and social elite" of the country...
...Few serious studies of the subject have been published...
...Anthony Cave Brown answers a lot of questions and provides a mountain of facts for spyworks aficionados to quarry in...
...John joined the Islamic Wahabi sect, became an adviser to King Ibn Saud, and favored Standard Oil, Ford and other American, rather than British, interests...
...No UK court could have condemned Philby without putting the top brass of SIS in the pillory, poor chaps...
...Not only did SIS and Whitehall moles betray secrets by the truckload, they maximized instability in the Middle East and helped the Kremlin obtain footholds there...
...Bruce wrote in his diary in July 1944: "On the positive intelligence side, Broadway [SIS headquarters] is lamentably weak, especially as regards Germany"—although Britain had been at war with Germany for nearly five years...
...Both came to despise their social class and its cliches, and served foreign regimes far more rigid and cruel than the one they had turned their backs on...
...SIS suspended Philby, then decided it loved him after all...
...then he took on Kim Philby and Donald Maclean as well...
...seemed to lose interest in the region, and imprisoned as a traitor on his return to England, until friends in high circles obtained his release...
...These men and their dupes converted the once Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) into the most subversive organization in Britain (left-wing Laborites were Rule Britannia chauvinists by comparison) and gulled Whitehall into squandering hundreds of millions of the hapless taxpayers' pounds...
...intelligence officer referred to a secret American-Israeli operation that identified Maclean, Burgess and Philby, in that order, as Soviet agents and used them to plant disinformation in Moscow...
...Meetings with Communist militants led to an approach by a Soviet agent who recruited him for intelligence work...
...Kim Philby is, however, unlikely to be remembered for idealism or devotion to principles...
...Modin's memoirs—My Five Cambridge Friends, well translated by Anthony Roberts (Farrar Straus Giroux, 282 pp., $23.00)—are less detailed than Cave Brown's meticulous study but fill in the Russian background and are rich in human interest and in circumstantial irony...
...Hamlet got that right...
...He has had the excellent idea of making this a tale of two Phil-bys: St...
...And Philby appears in a new disguise (hold onto your chair): "In a sense, he was one of the true founders of the CIA...
...As a result of Philby's interference with the flow of reports from Germany, America's OSS (which was looked down on by SIS) knew so much more than British intelligence about the plot to kill Hitler that SIS chief Stewart Menzies had to ask the head of OSS in London, David Bruce, for his file on the subject...
...Before long he, in turn, was recruiting well-placed men like Donald Maclean, a rising star in the Foreign Office, and the brilliant but rash Guy Burgess, a homosexual who, according to Cave Brown, gave the Russians the names of 200 playmates vulnerable to pressure who were in or close to the "upper reaches of the British political and military establishment...
...After praising Burgess' intellectual brilliance, Modin comments: "It [is] hard to understand why he sacrificed a future as a high official...
...In England, Philby and other intriguers had been protected for years by the Official Secrets Act and the "old-boy network...
...Yet neither Menzies nor any other senior SIS man bothered to look into this apparent inefficiency...
...He arrived in the West at the age of 25 with a weary wife and a howling baby, dazzled by the beauty of Paris and the bustle of London, and feeling like a peasant in his Russian clothes...
...Both St...
...A senior British official of the same organization warned Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser of Anglo-French preparations to occupy the Suez Canal zone...
...He was abandoned by Ibn Saud in 1940, when the U.S...
...After World War II, Britain's newly-elected Labor government inherited intelligence, diplomatic and propaganda services that had been infiltrated by apla-toon of Soviet agents—the famous five, led by Kim Philby, and at least 20 others...
...Soon afterward, Burgess followed...
...It didn't matter...
...But his devotion to the Soviets survived the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the revival of Russian imperialism, and Moscow's collusion with Third World tyrants...
...John Philby and his son Harold, nicknamed Kim after Kipling's juvenile spy...
...All were Cambridge graduates, all—except Cairncross?were upper-middle class and snobbish, yet he empathized with them with amazing ease, setting them stiff tasks as well as receiving their reports...
...They were more idealistic Communists than most Russians...
...To deceive the KGB, or...
...These moles were not mercenaries...
...In America, doubts about Philby were expressed in 1950...
...Philby did all he could to keep hostilities going and to discourage the Germans who plotted to kill Hitler...
...Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, saw him at CIA headquarters and told James Jesus Angleton that Philby was a Communist he had met in Vienna in 1934...
...They were gentlemen, and a gentleman doesn't have to be paid to stab you in the back...
...In 1951 Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow...
...In his youth, Kim had been shocked by the poverty and ignorance of the British working class...
...Occasionally, I have met loyal Britons who admitted having known of Whitehall-financed skulduggery but felt uneasy about telling tales...
...He then embarked for Russia in a merchant ship while an SIS colleague, sent by London to discuss his future, was admiring the admittedly magnificent view of Beirut harbor by night...
...In 1949 Philby was posted to the UK Embassy in Washington...
...What a piece of work is a man...
...Convinced by conscience that Western society was evil, they considered their treachery pure and heroic—and a few of them, notably Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, were almost crazily courageous...
...Helped by friends, he bluffed his way into the SIS...
...John (pronounced "Smjun" in upper-middle England) and Kim had a privileged upbringing and were taught to recite orthodox opinions...
...They sniped at the United States and exacerbated Arab-Israeli hostility and inter-Arab feuds...
...The most successful handler ever was surely Yuri Modin...
...In 1945, with America again in the ascendant, Ibn Saud recalled him and provided a pretty 16-year-old girl to keep him happy...
...One, a pro-Jewish Methodist, said that athree-man team had been sent from London in the late 1940s to place an explosive charge, supposedly a token of Arab anger, aboard a ship in a French port that was taking Jewish refugees to Israel...
...They contributed to the collapse of British influence in Arabia, Egypt, the Levant, Iran, and Iraq, and repelled many of Great Britain's wartime friends in America and continental Europe...
...From then on Kim adopted an anti-Soviet pose...
...In 1968, more than 30 years after his recruitment as a spy, he reaffirmed?in his book My Secret War—his faith in "the principles of the Revolution," declaring that they would "outlive the aberration of individuals...
...A colleague warned Philby that Burgess' homosexcapades might land him in "worse" scrapes in Washington than they had in London...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
