BRITAIN'S GREAT SPY SCANDAL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000600330053-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2000
• Sequence Number: 53
• Publication Date: October 9, 1967
• Content Type: NSPR

$f 3eciai Correspondence to The Times-Dispatch
13 ),.N, Anthony T.ejeune
i,
that the head. of the British secre
service was a Soviet agent? Well
would you believe that the man wh
almost became head of the Britis
secret service, and did in fact lea
the counterespionage section, was
Soviet agent?. You'd better believe It
because it'$- true.
There n'r}v seems little doubt tha
Kim Philby, the "Third Man" in th
Burgess and Maclean affair and fo
many years a senior officer at th
heart of M16, Britain's intelligent
organization', was recruited by th
Soviets a few months after leavin
the university in 1933, and, from the
on, passed information regularly t
then Communists.
These startling revelations abou
Philby, far more explicit than an
thing which was publicly known b
fore, have appeared simultaneous)
in two British newspapers.. They an
authenticated by Philby's son, wh
has just visited him in Moscow.
The r : government tried t
get then:,uppressed. The Russians
on the other hand, "proud of. wha
was indeed ? a remarkable achieve
ment and, ready enough to embar
rass the British authorities, probabl
helped them along a little -. whit
doesn't make them any less true. .
Just to rub a bit more salt in th
wound, they were preceded a coups
of days earlier by the first picture
of. that other master spy for th
Communists, George Blake, who es
taped from prison last year, no
apparently happy and well in Mos
cow.
* i,* *
THE DAMAGE those two men did i
incalculable. Blake betrayed who)
'sts of British agents to the Ru
slans. Philby was at one time hea
of MI6's Washington office, respon
SW e for laisioh with the CIA and th
FBI.
What conclusions can we dra
from these terrible cases? It is fai
to say that the most blatant weak
nesses in thh system were correcte
after a searching investigation i
1960. It might also be argued tha
the damage would have been mor
restricted If the links between the
British and American intelligence
communities had been less close.
This may be true, but the price, in
terms of "over-all usefulness, would
be too high to pay. And this argu-
ment cuts the other way too; the
most valuable spy-catching has been
achieved through information passed
on from one Western Intelligence
network to another.
In any protracted war, cold or hot,
there will be disasters. These things
happen. They happen to the Russians
too, if we are to believe the Pen-
kovsky story.
But two sentences from one news-
paper account of the Philby affair
are worth pondering. He got away
with it, The Observer says, because
the system of personal contacts and
trust which formed the traditional
structure of the British secret serv-
ice failed to take account of the
fact that "the events of the thirties
had eroded the loyalties 'of the
younger. intelligentsia."
* * *
BOTH BLAKE AND PHILBY were
ideological traitors - as, from the'
opposite point of view, was Pen-
kovsky.
What matters Is the practical con-
sequence, which some people have
still not understood.
Espionage, in the great struggle??
which divides the modern world, is
not a question of sinister foreigners.
peering through the long grass and
sketching gun emplacements. Its
vital battles, Its - fatal subversions,
take place in the mind. What we are
defending are not just hunks of real
estate labelled Britain and America
but a set of ideas, of political prior-
ities, which are the conditions of
freedom.
The traitors and enemies against
whom we must try to protect our-
selves are not simply national oppo-
nents but men and women, whether
inside or outside our own frontiers,.
who attack, betray and erode those
ideas. Not to recognize this danger
-- to blur it, for example, in a woolly
cloud of liberal anti-anti-communism
has become the gravest weakness
in any security system.,,-,
Approved For Release 2001/07/27: CIA-RDP75-00149R000600330053-5
Approved For Relea 8~'YR 2001GHT/27 CIA-RDP75-0dif Ob600
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