A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
By Ben Macintyre,
Bloomsbury, 368 pages, £20
Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy
By Tim Milne,
Biteback Publishing, 304 pages, £20
The man with a secret is the man with power, Aristotle observes, and no life could illustrate the truth of the maxim more emphatically than that of Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, pupil of Westminster School and Cambridge graduate, clubman, cricket enthusiast, bon viveur and tireless party-thrower, ace undercover agent and, as Ben Macintyre would have it, great betrayer. Not only did he condemn many people, perhaps hundreds, to cruel and ignominious deaths, he also clandestinely manipulated some of the leading figures in Western security services for decades, charming out of them all manner of the most sensitive information and passing it on to the KGB. As more than one of his dupes ruefully observed, he fooled them all.
Yet what kind of power is it that the double agent enjoys? Of the people Philby moved among — wives, lovers, children, friends, fond colleagues — not a single one was taken into his confidence. He hugged his secret to him and, one presumes, fed his ego on it. That is a kind of power, certainly. “Philby enjoyed deception,” Macintyre writes. “Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce. Some men like to parade their knowledge. Others revel in the possession of information that they decline to share, and the private sense of superiority that this brings.”
Even his Russian handler, the suave and sophisticated Yuri Modin, who ran the Cambridge spy network, found Philby to be an enigma. Modin wrote of him: “He never revealed his true self. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves [the KGB] ever managed to pierce the armour of mystery that clad him ... in the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.”
This is surely right, but only to a point. Philby would have hotly denied the charge of mockery. In an interview with the journalist Phillip Knightley in Moscow in 1988, he was adamant: “I don’t like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it.” Bad he may have felt, but he never faltered. After his defection to Moscow he was joined by his third wife, Eleanor, who one day asked him what was more important in his life, her and their children, or the Communist Party. “The party, of course,” he answered. One reads this exchange with a shiver, yet with a certain admiration, too. How many of us would have the steel to give ourselves over so unwaveringly to a cause?
In all the books, articles and memoirs in which Philby has figured it is striking how little attention, indeed, how much credence, is given to his belief in the communist revolution. The question is asked over and over: how could he do it? How could he deceive his family, friends and colleagues? How could he betray so many agents in the field, to be shot at border posts or sent into the Lubyanka to face torture and execution? The answer, at one level, is simple. He had a faith, and he never lost it.
For those whom he deceived, Philby had to be made into a grandmaster of duplicity, a great and terrible genius; if he were anything less, they would seem even more careless, gullible and plain stupid than they were. The fact is, however, Philby was a perfectly ordinary product of his time and milieu, except for one thing, the ferocity of his commitment to a cause. “What Philby’s enemies described as betrayal,” Macintyre writes, “he saw as loyalty.” For all his clubbability, for all the drinks parties he gave and the cricket matches he attended, Philby was a fanatic, and fanaticism is something that we in the secular and more or less democratic West find almost impossible to understand.
Simply put, we have forgotten what it is to be seized by the force of an idea. Isaiah Berlin, contemplating the “ideological storms” that swept through the 20th century, cautioned that “it is as well to realise that these great movements began with ideas in people’s heads: ideas about what relations between men have been, are, might be, and should be; and to realise how they came to be transformed in the name of a vision of some supreme goal in the minds of the leaders, above all of the prophets with armies at their backs.”
For all that we might marvel at Philby’s unwavering loyalty to the party, it is easy to sympathise with the wounded bafflement of the people who were closest to him professionally, or who thought themselves closest to him, such as his MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott and the CIA chief James Jesus Angleton, both of whom he took in, chewed on, and spat out with not a moment’s hesitation or, for all his protestations, real remorse.
Philby’s friend and fellow spy, the novelist Graham Greene, famously remarked that “in the lost childhood of Judas Christ was betrayed”. In the case of Philby, commentators reach back into his earliest days in search of a solution to the conundrum that he represents. There are those who point to the love-hate relations between him and his doughty father, the Arabist St John Philby, as the source of a violent drive towards duplicity and betrayal. It seems a dubious proposition.
In this context it is useful to turn to “Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy”, the late Tim Milne’s finely written and refreshingly unhysterical book. He and Philby were pupils together at Westminster, where Milne’s first and peculiarly apposite memory of his friend is of “a very small boy happily trying to squash a bigger boy behind a cupboard door”. Milne, nephew of the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, would later serve in MI6 — was there anyone in that circle who did not do his and sometimes even her stint as a spy? — and is sceptical of the Oedipal theory as an explanation of Philby’s betrayals. St John Philby had been a popular success at Westminster, but “Kim was uninterested in trying to emulate ... these successes, nor did he give the impression of having turned his back on them because he knew he would fall short of his father’s achievement: it was merely that he thought he had better things to do.”
Philby travelled in Germany as a student — Milne gives fascinating and revealing accounts of his friend’s behaviour and attitudes at this time — and later he worked as a journalist in Spain, where, thanks to his cover as a Nationalist sympathiser, he was decorated by Franco himself; it was one of the many ironies of Philby’s extraordinary life that besides this signal honour he was also awarded medals by both Britain and the Soviet Union.
As with many young Englishmen of his generation, the spectacle of the Nazi takeover in Germany, and then of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, drove him to communism. Unlike most of the others, however, he dedicated his life to the overthrow of capitalism. But did he truly believe in the cause? Milne writes, “To become a communist is one thing; to remain a communist is quite another” and goes on to quote Philby’s own account of the Pascalian wager that he made: “It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course.” With that mixture of candour and what Greene called Philby’s “chilling certainty” there is no arguing.
Yet we must beware of being lulled into accepting Philby’s own estimate of himself and his motives. Nothing in life is simple, and in Philby’s life in particular every layer gave on to other, deeper layers. There is the fact that for all his left-wing convictions he was also a snob. “In some ways,” Macintyre shrewdly suggests, “Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs,” and what could be more exclusive than a club that has only one member?
And then there is the performance itself, in which a move was never missed or a line fluffed. Nietzsche recognised that to be truly convincing to others a man must learn to impersonate himself; as one of his closest friends observed of Philby, “he was the greatest actor in the world”. And at the start of each day’s performance he must pray, along with Samuel Butler: “Vouch safe O Lord to keep us this day without being found out.”
It might seem that by now Philby as a subject had been done to death, but as these two books amply illustrate, he is still a source of fascination and wonderment. Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller, concentrating on Philby’s friendship with and betrayal of Elliott and of Angleton, his pathetically dedicated admirer at the top of the CIA. Macintyre’s account of the verbal duel between Elliott and Philby in their final confrontation in Beirut in 1963 is worthy of John le Carré at his best — and indeed, Le Carré contributes an afterword, which is as eloquent in what it does not say as in what it does. Milne, for his part, treats his old friend and deceiver with surprising tenderness. “I do not regret knowing him,” he writes. “He enriched my world for many years and I owed a lot to him.” The Philby charm held good to the bitter end.
And speaking of ends, have we learnt all there is to know about Philby the master spy? What exactly did Yuri Modin mean when he spoke of Philby having made “a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves”? When it comes to spying, Jim Angleton used to say, we are in a hall of mirrors, in which everything is reflected doubly, triply, endlessly.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
John Banville’s “The Black-Eyed Blonde” (written as Benjamin Black) is published by Mantle.
