Spy Vs. Spy : Cold...

Kim Philby--spy, traitor, philanderer, drunk--died in 1988 at an exclusive clinic in Moscow, his home for a quarter century. For services rendered, the Soviet state provided a lavish, limited-admission funeral at the extremely exclusive KGB Club. There the spy agency’s top officers delivered secret eulogies on the murky career of their English friend and ideological trophy.

Afterward, the open casket was hauled to the even more exclusive Kuntsevo Cemetery, where Philby’s fourth wife gave him a final tender kiss. Before the coffin was sealed, some in the graveside crowd claimed to see a faint, enigmatic smile on the lips of the well-tended corpse.

Whether real or sculpted by a subtle mortician, the expression was as ambiguous as Philby’s life. As “the spy of the century,” Philby was a genius at eluding sharp focus. Thanks partly to his great personal charm, he was able to sugarcoat his treason even after his damning flight from the West to the Soviet Union in 1963. And thanks partly to his knack for self-promotion and propaganda, Philby became one of the Cold War’s superstars--without ever revealing very much about himself.

The affable, deceitful man with a large whiskey capacity has intrigued journalists, playwrights, novelists and filmmakers, all of whom have found eager audiences for their interpretations of Philby’s shadow world. Indeed, his extraordinary double career with Great Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service and an alphabet soup of Soviet espionage agencies made him a sort of George Washington of spies. His house in Istanbul, where he was posted in the late 1940s, became a tourist attraction. Other haunts, such as his favorite bar in Beirut, also acquired luster from their association with Philby.

Since Philby’s death, of course, the world has been turned upside down, as two new books on his life demonstrate. Both Anthony Cave Brown’s “Treason in the Blood” and Genrikh Borovik and Phillip Knightley’s “The Philby Files” owe much to the opening of Cold War sources, including chunks of Philby’s official KGB file and his personal papers. Although there probably never will be a final word on Philby simply because of the clandestine nature of espionage, the two volumes throw new light on vast stretches of his bizarre and puzzling life.

Cave Brown’s fascinating father-son biography is the most thorough account likely to be written on Kim Philby and his exceedingly odd family roots. A major thesis of “Treason in the Blood” is that St. John Philby’s example influenced his son’s betrayal of Great Britain. As the tale unfolds, the lives of father and son take on an eerie, fun house-mirror quality that makes you wonder if treason could be an inherited trait.

The elder Philby was a strange duck, an anti-imperialist who railed and schemed against the British Empire while he craved recognition from it. He became famous for his exploits during and after World War I, including exploration of the desolate Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, but resigned from government service under a cloud shortly after the war. He was held in detention later, during World War II, because of suspect loyalties.

St. John Philby played a major role in the politics of Middle Eastern oil, ensuring that the vast Saudi oil fields would be developed by America rather than Britain. As an adviser to Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud, he converted to the Muslim faith and fathered a second family--without ever divorcing Kim’s mother. He seldom saw his English family but tried to direct it via the remote control of his voluminous letters. In the case of Kim, he succeeded, perhaps beyond his most fevered wishes.

Sired and perhaps inspired by a compulsive iconoclast, Kim Philby claimed that he began to doubt the existence of God while still in kindergarten. He also boasted that he had become “a godless little anti-imperialist before I reached my teens.” (This from a person thought to have been one of the models for A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin.)

As Cave Brown portrays them, Kim and his father, St. John, lived on the fringe of history. Both were behind-the-scenes types, albeit not always by choice. Both influenced world events in profound ways. Both chose to serve foreign masters who used them even while they distrusted them. Both were deeply alienated from their native country, yet each epitomized a certain kind of Englishness. Both went to the right schools, knew all the right people and had the intelligence and capacity for work to make the best of both.

The father-son symbiosis also may have gone deeper than mere example. According to Cave Brown, the possibility exists that the senior Philby played a role in his son’s recruitment to the Soviet cause. He bases this conjecture on testimony that the Soviet government regarded the father as “an asset” and that a KGB file on St. John Philby had been placed inside his son’s file--then later removed. Yet one wonders; both of these books present persuasive evidence that one of Kim’s first jobs for the Soviets was to spy on his own father.

Not surprisingly, friends sometimes thought both Philbys mad. In Kim, the signs of instability were less overt than in his father. Nonetheless one colleague eventually concluded that the son was “a schizophrenic with a supreme talent for deception.”

Whatever his mental condition, Philby was superb at what he did. He began working for the Soviets in 1934 at age 22 and apparently served them faithfully and well for more than half a century. He helped recruit fellow leftist friends from Cambridge University into Communist service, most notably Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blount. He provided the Soviets with mountains of high-quality information on military and diplomatic matters during the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the early years of the Cold War. He also betrayed anti-Communist agents and sent many to certain death. At the same time he fashioned successful careers in journalism and in British intelligence.

Despite his fabulous luck and skill, Philby’s world began to come apart in the early 1950s, when Burgess and MacLean fled behind the Iron Curtain, throwing suspicion on Philby as “the third man” who had made the escape possible. Still Philby managed to hold on for 12 years before fleeing himself. In that time he was more or less constantly suspected of dark deeds but investigators could pin nothing on their slippery target.

Simultaneously, Philby was bedeviled by the collapse of his second marriage and the need to earn a living. Aileen Philby was in and out of mental institutions (she cut herself with scissors and sometimes injected herself with her own urine), but it is almost inconceivable that she knew nothing of his double life. Philby apparently was never sure whether she would rat on him. At one point, Cave Brown reports, Philby’s domestic situation required him to sleep in a tent pitched on the yard of his home.

Ultimately and astonishingly, he was rehired by the British secret service and sent to Beirut under journalistic cover.

Cave Brown covers all this and more with a wonderful feel for the absurdities of British and American spy mania in the 1950s and early ‘60s. In a delicious tidbit among many, reports that British P. M. Harold Macmillan despaired that the security scandals would never end. At the close of one particularly bad day, Macmillan wrote in his diary that yet another British agent had been arrested, this time for “wandering around the loos in the park, passing things, probably opium or something.”

Despite Cave Brown’s best efforts, questions remain about Philby’s flight from Beirut aboard a Soviet freighter in 1963. Was Philby planted in Moscow by the British and Americans or was he a genuine defector? Cave Brown concludes that “we shall not know, for the Philby case was one in which the secret services of all three countries involved--Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States--found it necessary to keep silent. No individual told the whole truth about what lay behind the affair, least of all Philby.”

Cave Brown also concedes that the truth behind the celebrated relationship between Philby and the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton remains beyond grasp. Did Angleton, the counterintelligence guru of the American agency, hoodwink Philby or did Philby checkmate Angleton? Apparently no one knows the answer. But Cave Brown presents evidence based on “private information” that two CIA executives who distrusted Angleton met untimely deaths, which leaves open the possibility that Angleton and Philby were in cahoots.

After the feast of “Treason in the Blood,” Borovik and Knightley’s book seems like small potatoes. The impression is deceptive.

Borovik, a Moscow writer and TV personality, was given access to one volume of Philby’s KGB files (the KGB had suppressed a novel of his; this access, he claims, was his pay-back). The files primarily covered Philby’s first years as a spy for the Soviets. He also had access to Philby and conducted extensive interviews with him in the years shortly before his death. Knightley, a well-known British journalist and author of a Philby biography, edited Borovik’s manuscript and wrote an introduction. The result is an awkward book that nonetheless contains a great deal of insight into the nuts and bolts of Philby’s secret life.

Among other things, Borovik reports that Philby and other English spies were deeply distrusted by the KGB, which suspected all were double agents. He also reports that, unlike recently exposed CIA turncoat Alrich Ames, the British spies were reluctant to take money for their work. The reasons for refusal were both practical and idealistic. They believed in their cause and none wanted the suspicion extra cash bestows.

Interestingly, Borovik was able to compare Philby’s words with his files. Not surprisingly, Philby lied to him or was less than forthcoming on occasion, including about his little-known involvement in a plot to kill Spain’s General Francisco Franco.

Both books provide fascinating detail on Philby’s last days, an indicator of the kind of information that is now accessible in Russia. Cave Brown notes that doctors searched high and low for a special Uzbeki wine believed helpful in treating his heart condition (they got it from the Archimandrite of Moscow; it seemed to help for a bit). And Borovik writes that in the month before his death, Philby’s chronic insomnia had recurred with a vengeance.

So in the end, Philby could not sleep until he slept forever. What was it, one wonders, that kept him awake?