KIM PHILBY OF HER MAJESTY'S SECXRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70B00338R000300220001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 15, 2005
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 12, 1968
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2006/01/30 : CIA-RDP70B00338R000300220001-0
BOOK WORLD
The WashinS'con Poet
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THE PHILBY CONSPIRACY. By Bruce Page, Phillip n/~ '7 7 ? ^J
c{iiightIcy and David Leitch. Illustrated. Doubleday. 312 pp. ~. u~: v`.:/~.1~wtJi:? I ~:iut: ~/4:-.~ ~l:/~ ~~tt~.~t./S5.95. a __
By Thomas W. Braden
Aghast, one puts down The Philby Conspiracy. The
joint product of a team of journalists working for the
London Sunday Times, it is the most sustained, the most
horrifying and the best account of international espio-
nage that has been written, at least since Rebecca West's
The Meaning of Treason.
The mind searches for reassurance. Finding none, it
springs to self-defense. "Thou shalt not bear false wit-
ness," it recalls. One would not have known such a man,
he could not have been in the circle of one's friends.
But the exercise is fruitless. Kim Philby was in the
circle of one's friends, not in the close sense of "what
friends thou bast and their endurance tried" -he was
never that to anyone, not even to his wife - a fact
which might go unnoticed only in a secret service where
amicable disengagement is also good security. But one
had a drink with Philby at the house of friends. Be-
cause he was the personification of the alliance, Her
Majesty's representative on matters "most secret," one,
greeted him in the office of the boss rather more
cheerily than one might greet a fellow member of "the
firm."
One was guarded of course. The boss would raise
the subject about which the representative of the British
Secret Intelligence Service had a "need to know." Still,
one. thought that Philby was on friendly terms with all
the senior partners, that he had more access to the care-
fully compartmentalized secrets of the various divisions
of the firm than any of the firm's junior executives.
So where does the mind come out? It is at last forced
to face an abasing truth: that it is possible for a man to
accept from those with whom he walks all that they can
give in affection, well-being, education, trust and honor,
and in return lie to them, steal from them, betray them,
even murder them.
Now, in 1968, after Hiss, after Nunn May, after
Fuchs and Blake, after Burgess and Maclean - who
play secondary roles in The Philby Conspiracy-the
case of H. A. R. (Kim) Philby is still shocking.
It is shocking because Philby had none of the weak-
nesses or oddities which might cause acquaintance to
pause on the brink of confidence. He was not a drunk
(Maclean) or homosexual (Burgess and Blake). He
was not an adolescent egomaniac (Nunn May and
Fuchs). He was not even passionate about austerity as
Colonel Penkovskiy seemed passionate about luxury.
Nor did Philby have any of the excuses by which the
sociologist or the psychologist will explain our mis-
Lallavior. He was not poor, not deformed, not a mem.
bar of any group which other groups look upon as
inferior.
But P :ilby is shocking for a more important reason.
He is shocking because he grew up in a society which
tolerates rebellion, even to some degree respects it. He
betrayed this society to another which punishes re-
bellion with death. It is tempting to compare Philby
with Penkovskiy. Both were intelligence officers, though
on opposite sides. Both were traitors to their govern-
ments. But the temptation must be put aside. Penkovskiy
rebelled in favor of conscience; Philby turned over his
conscience to anti-conscience.
Philby grew to manhood at Cambridge as a student
of economics and history during a time - the Thirties
- when economics was not working very well and his-
tory seemed (as perhaps it does to the current college
generation) to grow gloomier as it came closer. The
authors of The Philby Conspiracy quote John Maynard
Keynes, whose lectures the young Philby must have
attended. Keynes deplored the tendency towards Com.
munism among the young of that Cambridge era and
attributed it to a "recrudescence of the strain of Puritan-
ism in our blood, the zest to adopt a painful solution b
cause of its painfulness."
But one can find little of the Puritan rebel in any
other aspect of Philby's career, at Cambridge or later.
Surely this university student who campaigned for
Labour with a speech about "the heart of England j'
beating "not in stately homes but in the factories and
on the farms" would also have given thought to the
place of the rebel in his society. He would have con-
sidered the challenge rebellion creates, or the changes
it frequently brings. There is a place for the rebel in
free society. Philby cannot be granted that status. Hp
was a traitor to conscience as well as to state. i
So much for the shock imposed by the man. Ther4
are two more shocks presented by The Philby Con-
spiracy. Let us take them not in order of importance,
but as they come.
The first is the shock of seeing the society of Great
Britain as it took Philby and his co-conspirators to its
bosom, nurtured them, protected them, drew them closer
and refused to repel them in the face of obvious warn-
ings that they were sucking its life blood.
Maclean, let it be repeated, was a drunk. Not merely
a man who had one too many too often, but a gutter
drunk, an angry, brawling drunk, a drunk found in the
morning on the floor of other
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Thomas Pl. Braden w
'r~R3~ aff~~s `2~ .01/30 : CIA-R0P70B00338R000300220001-0
1954. He is now editor and publisher of the Oceanside,
California Blade-Tribune.
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 Approved For Release 2006/01/30 CIA-RDP70B00338R000300220001-0
Burgess, as I remember him in Washington, wore fur
on his shoes and talked about his "boy friends." But he
was not just effeminate. He was a police-blotter homo.
sexual who had an openly avowed fancy for collecting
whips.
And Philby? Well, Philby was a model of the circum-
0
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spect intelligence officer. But he had told a few people
at Cambridge and later that.he was a member of the
Communist party.
Here, it is important to make a distinction between
the security services of the two states which fought the
war against fascism side by side. It is inconceivable
that the United States Government would have. em-
ployed a drunk of Maclean's public renown or a man
who boasted openly of his homosexuality as Burgess
did. It is true that there were Communists in the war-
time O.S.S. Some of them performed bravely on tasks
behind the lines befitting their peculiar allegiance. Gen-
eral Donovan, who headed our wartime intelligence,
said he was proud of them, but whenever he said so, he
would name their names, thus proving a point. if he
missed a few, there was no one then to say him nay.
But that was before 1946. After the Central Intelli-
gence Agency took over from O.S.S. in 1947, it would
have been impossible for a Philby to have joined it.
Why? Because Philby had joined the Communist party
in his. youth. No matter that he covered his tracks by
feigning sympathy with Hitler and winning a fascist
decoration from Franco (in itself enough to bar him
from C.I.A.), the Communist record was there.
Yet British security permitted Philby to rise to the
rank of No. 3 man in S.I.S. and appointed him chief
liaison officer with the C.I.A.
There is no way to explain this stupidity except in
terms of Philby's family, P hilby's school, Philby's uni-
versity, Philby's father's membership in the right sort
of London club. The authors do an excellent job of
explaining what is really inexplicable to an American.
But now comes The Philby Conspiracy's final shock:
What good is security within a secret agency if its see-
rots are imparted to a friendly but penetrated foreign
intelligence agency?
The record now shows that America's C.I.A. was
badly compromised. At the least, it was compromised
between the years 1949, when Philhy came to Washing.
ton, and mid-1951, when he was recalled. At most, the
record could say that the C.I.A. is still compromised. .
Philby knew the organization of the Agency. He
knew its agents and its operations in the planning stage.
Most important, he knew what C.I.A. wanted to know.
To know this is to know a great deal. It would be
difficult to decide when time relegates such knowledge
to disused filing cabinets. Philby admits, for example,
to one crime based upon information he gained in
Washington. He admits to the massacre of hundreds of
brave Albanians who parachuted into their homeland
from Washington for many years. But he knew what
C.I.A. wanted to know. He may still know.
So the damage Philby did to the American intelli-
gence e fort is. still inestimable. What can be done
about it? The authors sum up one side with appalling
succinctness: "V/hen the extent of Philby's treachery
was finally realized, the C.I.A. had no choice, short of
disbanding the whole organization, but to smile bravely
and carry on."
Still, by now, a law of diminishing returns must have
set in for Philby. His value to the K.G.B., where he
goes to work each morning in Moscow, must diminish
a little with each passing day.
But we too are subject to a law of diminishing re-
turns. In the days of Philby the intelligence community
consisted of a top-level staff and some assistants. Since
then, this community - Defense Department Intelli-
gence and C.I.A. -has grown to a vast industry which
spends about 21/2 billion dollars a year, employs more
than 60,OCO people and produces an amount of paper
which God himself would have difficulty digesting even
if He did not already know what the Russians were up
to. the growth of our intelligence effort is surely one
of the reasons why Philby's value to the Russians must
be diminishing. He- could not encompass it all.
But can we? How can we make sure that all these
put them on the/l *pet,4d Ffbr RgerQa 4't/30gEQl]A-1OP 10f 3 090c&O 22aWlifing more
went down,. destroying the summit conference between people to watch paper and people? The prospect seems
Eisenhower and Khrushchev, Philby had- been gone as gloomy as the past. . ig
in the early Fifties, taking part in a joint C.I.A.-S.I.S.
operation.
He does not admit to an equally important crime,
and the authors do not charge him with it. Nevertheless,
in the opinion of this reviewer, it seems probable that
Philby gave the Russians the information necessary to