World: The Communist in M.I. 6

When Communist Spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escaped to Moscow in 1951 just before British intelligence moved in on them, the big question was who had tipped them off that they had been discovered. The finger of suspicion pointed at Harold A.R. Philby, an officer of Britain’s M.I. 6 itself, but Philby was defended in Parliament by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan and managed to survive two investigations—before himself fleeing to Moscow from Beirut in 1963. Still,”the public never learned just how big a spy “Kim” Philby really was. Last week two London newspapers—the Observer and the Sunday Times—simultaneously exposed Philby as perhaps the most important spy that Russia has ever had in the West.

Old-Boy Ties. The two papers reached their carefully documented conclusions after months of following Philby’s tortuous trail from his college days to the Kremlin. The son of H. St.

John Philby, a noted Arabic scholar who adopted the Moslem religion and became chief adviser to Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud, Kim was born to rebellion. An “old boy” of an exclusive British public school, he was recruited by the Communists in 1934 while he was studying German in Vienna. His assignment: to penetrate British intelligence, no matter how long it took. The assignment paid off. After a stint covering the Spanish Civil War from the Franco side for the London Times, Philby made use of his old-boy ties and conservative credentials to get a job with M.I. 6.

He rose rapidly. By the end of World War II, he was chief of British counter-Soviet intelligence operations. In 1948, he became head of British intelligence in Washington, helped organize the CIA. He was even considered eligible to become chief of the entire intelligence apparatus of M.I. 6, although some of his colleagues felt that he drank rather too much and did not belong to quite the right clubs. All the while, Kim Philby managed to carry the art of espionage several steps farther than any double agent before or since.

Consummate Duplicity. As British counterintelligence chief, he knew every strategic secret—from the development of new nuclear weapons to troop deployments—that might interest the Russians; his job was to track down and tell his government exactly which secrets had been penetrated by Russian spies. From that position, he 1) kept the Kremlin up to date on everything that really mattered, 2) selected which secrets to tell the British that the Russians knew about, and 3) told the Russians which secrets he had told the British they knew about.

As head of British intelligence operations in Washington for more than two years, Philby was often called upon for advice by the CIA, which was being set up to replace the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Philby especially hated the success of U.S. capitalism, and he happily told the Russians about the CIA’s projects and organization. Along the way, he received regular briefings on U.S. intelligence operations from CIA Chief Walter Bedell Smith and knew every counterintelligence move that the CIA made. When he was final ly dismissed from M.I. 6, it was only at the insistent demand of the CIA, which had discovered his role in the wake of the Burgess-Maclean case. Even then, he was protected by his old-boy colleagues until 1962, when the confession of another Moscow spy implicated him beyond all doubt. Despite this, he was given a confidential warning that action might be taken against him, and given more than a month to disappear. Now employed by a Moscow “publishing house,” Philby lives in a small apartment with the divorced wife of Donald Maclean.

Aside from his extraordinary career as a traitor and a spy, he can claim another distinction. Because of his consummate duplicity, he is undoubtedly the only Russian agent ever to have been decorated with the Order of the British Empire and to have been awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit, an unwittingly fitting tribute from Franco Spain.