My Silent War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Praise for Kim Philby

  Contents

  Introduction by Phillip Knightley

  Foreword

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  List of Abbreviations

  Curtain Raiser: a Whiff of the Firing Squad

  My Silent War

  I. Taken On By the Secret Service

  II. In and Out of Soe

  III. “An Old-Established Racket”—sis

  IV. British and Allied Intelligence Complex

  V. On the Up and Up

  VI. The Fulfilment

  VII. From War to Peace

  VIII. The Volkov Case

  IX. The Terrible Turk

  X. The Lion’s Den

  XI. The Cloudburst

  XII. Ordeal

  XIII. The Clouds Part

  Epilogue: Home and Dry

  Chronology

  Footnotes

  Index

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  Epub ISBN: 9781407060231

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  Published by Arrow Books in 2003

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  Copyright © 1968 by H. A. R. Philby

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by Phillip Knightley

  H. A. R. Philby has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or

  otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the

  publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1968 by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd.

  This edition published by arrangement with The Estate of Kim Philby.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to David Higham Associates for

  permission to reprint the foreword by Graham Greene to My Silent War by

  Kim Philby (Granada Publishing Ltd., London). Reprinted by permission.

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  ISBN 0 09 946236 2

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  “Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard Philby had confessed. . . . It is one thing to suspect the truth; it is another to hear it from a man’s lips. Suddenly there was very little fun in the game anymore; a Rubicon had been crossed. . . . To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed away, and the dark ages began.”

  —PETER WRIGHT, former assistant director of MI5

  “Kim Philby is a legend—a demon or an antihero, depending on one’s philosophical bent. Philby himself, or a thinly disguised fictional counterpart, stalks through many modern spy novels.”

  —ROBERT J. LAMPHERE, FBI special agent

  “[Philby] never revealed his true self. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves ever managed to pierce the armour of mystery that clad him. His great achievement in espionage was his life’s work, and it fully occupied him until the day he died. But in the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves.”

  —YURI MODIN, KGB controller of “the Cambridge Spies”

  “Philby has no home, no women, no faith. Behind the inbred upper-class arrogance, the taste for adventure, lies the self-hate of a vain misfit for whom nothing will ever be worthy of his loyalty. In the last instance, Philby is driven by the incurable drug of deceit itself.”

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Phillip Knightley

  FOREWORD by Graham Greene

  MY SILENT WAR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  CURTAIN RAISER: A WHIFF OF THE FIRING SQUAD

  I. TAKEN ON BY THE SECRET SERVICE

  II. IN AND OUT OF SOE

  III. “AN OLD-ESTABLISHED RACKET”—SIS

  IV. BRITISH AND ALLIED INTELLIGENCE COMPLEX

  V. ON THE UP AND UP

  VI. THE FULFILMENT

  VII. FROM WAR TO PEACE

  VIII. THE VOLKOV CASE

  IX. THE TERRIBLE TURK

  X. THE LION’S DEN

  XI. THE CLOUDBURST

  XII. ORDEAL

  XIII. THE CLOUDS PART

  EPILOGUE: HOME AND DRY

  CHRONOLOGY

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  Phillip Knightley

  Harold Adrian Russell Philby—“Kim” to his friends and family—has been part of my life for the past thirty years. I have written hundreds of thousands of words about Philby, appeared in many television and radio documentaries discussing him, and once spent a whole week talking to him in Moscow for six or seven hours a day. I have read every word of the more than twenty books written about him. I know his children and grandchildren and I keep in touch with his widow. Yet when people ask me, “What was Philby really like?,” I have to reply, “I’m not certain I know.”

  So before you embark on the journey of reading this, the only book Philby ever wrote about himself, before you decide whether it is a frank confession, a fascinating justification for his life, or an insidious piece of Communist propaganda—or possibly all three—let me tell you what I know about a man whose motives and exploits continue to intrigue a new generation fifteen years after his death.

  We should begin by giving Philby his professional due. In the history of espionage there has never been a spy like him, and now, with the Cold War over, there never will be. His achievements seem incredible. He joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in 1940 and in three years rose to be head of its anti-Soviet section. Yet right from his Cambridge University days this urbane, pipe-smoking paragon of the English middle class had been an agent of the KGB. So the man running British operations against the Russians was actually working for the Russians himself. No wonder so few British plans worked. No wonder so many Western agents who slipped behind the Iron Curtain were never heard of again.


  Worse was to come. In 1949 Philby was promoted to be the British Secret Service’s liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and the FBI. This gave him access not only to British operations against Moscow but to American ones as well. The result: at the height of the Cold War, every move the West made against the Communist bloc was betrayed by Philby before it even began. And there was every possibility that had it not been for one mistake, Philby would have gone on to become CSS, Chief of the British Secret Service. The KGB would, in effect, have been running MI6, a disaster that could have changed the course of the Cold War.

  This did not happen because Philby had shared his house in Washington with a fellow KGB agent, the British Foreign Office official Guy Burgess, and when Burgess fled to Moscow in 1951, Philby came under suspicion in the United States. He lingered on as a spy until 1963, doing freelance work for MI6 in Beirut under cover as a journalist, until his KGB masters, fearing that the British now had sufficient evidence to prosecute him and that the CIA might try to kill him, “brought me home to Moscow.”

  Back in 1968, with two colleagues on the Sunday Times of London, I wrote the first book about Philby—Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation. I then corresponded with Philby for twenty years and, in 1988, just three months before he died, spent a week with him, taking him step by step through his life.

  We used My Silent War to jog his memory. He told me that he had been working on the book intermittently ever since he had come to Moscow, but had been doubtful that the KGB would ever let him publish it. When my book came out in Britain, the KGB arranged for Philby’s book to be rushed into print. “But a lot of it was cut out,” Philby said. “And I didn’t have enough time to add new material.” It was clear that the book had enhanced his reputation within the KGB, although there were still some officers who wanted nothing to do with him. He was invited to give lectures to training classes, and occasionally he was shown files concerning difficult operational cases and asked for his view. He warned his masters against becoming too involved in Africa and did his best to deter them from invading Afghanistan. Then, in the stultifying years of the Brezhnev regime, he slumped into a long period of despair. He cheered up when the former head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, became leader, and when Mikhail Gorbachev took over, Philby was ecstatic. “This is the man we’ve been waiting for,” he said. He was annoyed that American commentators were suggesting that the West should wait to see whether Gorbachev meant what he said about peaceful coexistence, or whether his words concealed an aim to control Western Europe, China, and Japan. “Such a suggestion is ridiculous,” Philby said. “We have enough problems of our own without taking on other people’s. This is just another myth, like all that talk of the Soviet Union being a ‘Threat to the West’ since the end of the war. In 1945, the Soviet Union was exhausted. The United States had the atomic bomb. What would we hope to gain by deliberately attacking Western Europe? No one wants to be incinerated.”

  My main impression of Philby during these talks was that here was a man at ease with himself in the twilight of his life, happy to exist quietly in his comfortable Moscow apartment and, since he was not sorry that his career as a spy was over, prepared to speak frankly about what it had involved. I did my best to get to the core of the man, no easy task with a master spy for whom deception is a professional skill. He was a charming, witty, and amusing host with a mind as sharp as a cut-throat razor. Although we mostly discussed espionage and politics, I sought his views on marriage, friendship, patriotism, honor, loyalty, treachery, betrayal, and the human condition. He talked about his favorite spy-thriller writers, today’s youth, modern music, and the difficulties of life in the Soviet Union—but also its rewards. He touched on his health, Soviet medicine, his finances, a trip he had made to Cuba, his travels within the Eastern bloc, and his memories of his colleagues in the CIA, including a list of those he would like to see again. But since then I have learned things he never even hinted at, such as his role in the exposure and eventual execution of the American atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; the missing year in his life as a spy; what the KGB really thought about him; and, most astonishing of all, how MI6 tried to persuade him to re-defect to Britain.

  Philby came from an adventurous family. His father was Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a former magistrate in the Indian Civil Service, an explorer and an Arabist who became an adviser to King Saud. He held perverse political views and was interned at the start of the Second World War for telling Saud that he thought Hitler would win and that Saud should get his money out of pounds sterling. He felt that life should be lived to the hilt, an example he passed on to Kim. Women found the mix of idealism and love of action in both men an almost irresistible combination. After a tempestuous marriage, St. John Philby ended up with a Saudi slave girl. Kim had numerous affairs and married four times—a Viennese, an Englishwoman, an American, and a Russian. (The American joined him for a while in Moscow but left him when he expressed amazement that she should even bother to ask “If you had to choose between Communism and me, which would you choose?”)

  Kim Philby was in the thick of events in the thirties as the lights began to go out over Europe. He helped smuggle Jews and Communists out of Vienna. He was wounded in the Spanish Civil War, which he covered for The Times from the Franco side—while reporting to the KGB on German and Italian weapons being used there. He was still with The Times in France in 1940 and got out just ahead of the Germans. His expense account for the belongings he lost as he fled via Boulogne is still in the archives of the newspaper—“Dunhill pipe (two years old but all the better for it) one pound ten shillings.” No wonder he looked an ideal recruit for MI6.

  Yet this ideal recruit had already been signed up by the KGB back in 1934. Spotted while still at Cambridge because—like his fellow students Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, later known as the Cambridge spy ring—he believed that the Western democracies were unable to check the rise of Fascism and that only the Soviet Union could save the world. His critics—and, of course, there are many—while conceding that his initial commitment to the Soviet Union might have been understandable at the time, wonder how he could possibly have remained in the service of Moscow after the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939.

  One new piece of information is that he did not. According to KGB files, he was worried that valuable secrets he was providing about the British Expeditionary Force and the French army might now be passed on to the Germans. He demanded of his controller, “What’s going to happen to the single-front struggle against Fascism now?” On February 20, 1940, the London resident of the KGB reported to Moscow that Philby’s controller in Paris no longer knew where Philby was and that efforts to find him had failed. Moscow replied that such efforts should cease—Philby was finished; he was to be left out in the cold.

  But in 1941 the KGB learned to its surprise that without its orders and without its help, Philby had got into MI6. It hastened to get in touch with him again. This was a surreal period in the master spy’s career. It was clear that Germany was about to invade the Soviet Union: he could resume the anti-Fascist fight with a clear conscience.

  But having reestablished contact with Philby, the KGB was suddenly very wary. What if he was part of a devilish MI6 plot to penetrate the KGB? It ordered counterintelligence officer Elena Modrzhinskaya (she is said to be still alive and well and living in Moscow) to examine Philby’s file and decide whether he was a genuine recruit to Communism or a British penetration agent.

  The first point Modrzhinskaya raised with her bosses was the volume and value of the material Philby had sent to the KGB. Could MI6 really be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow? Next, was it really possible that Philby—with his Communist views, his work for the Communists in Vienna, and his Austrian Communist wife—had sailed through MI6’s vetting procedures? She concluded that Philby was really working for the British and that so too were all the other members of the Cambridge spy ring�
�except, perhaps, Donald Maclean.

  Her report split the KGB. Many of its officers believed that she was wrong and that Philby was an outstanding and loyal agent. In the end they prevailed, and the KGB continued to use Philby and the Cambridge ring. But there was always a group within the KGB who refused to trust him, and their nagging influence made his early years of exile in Moscow a misery. Word of Philby’s unhappiness leaked back to London, and MI6 mounted an operation to convince him to return, to redefect. This was a secret, long-term, and persistent plan. How do I know of it? Maurice Oldfield, who had been head of MI6 at the time, told me after he had retired that persuading Philby to return had been a ongoing operation. And in 1997 I met the former East German spymaster Markus Wolf, who had been host to Philby on his visits to East Germany. Wolf said, “I was responsible for his security arrangements and I entertained him—we did a bit of cooking together at my place in the country. He had a KGB escort, and one evening this officer told me that the KGB lived in fear that Philby would go back to Britain, a move that would deal a propaganda blow to Moscow. He said that the British Secret Service in Moscow had found ways of making several offers to persuade Philby to return.” This was puzzling, because in his twenty-five years in the Soviet Union, Philby had kept his Moscow address a secret. He avoided all other Westerners. If he wanted to go to a restaurant, his KGB minder arranged it, usually reserving a private room. So the “several offers” could only have been made in person by someone who had access to him on more than one occasion, someone he knew well. What follows now is speculation, because it is often impossible to prove matters in the secret world, but only one man fits the bill—the British novelist Graham Greene. Greene, who had been a colleague of Philby’s in MI6, had been corresponding with him since 1968, when, to the amazement of the literary world, he accepted an invitation from Philby’s British publishers and wrote the introduction to the first edition of this book. Then, in 1986, Greene went to Moscow and the two old spies got together for a reunion in Philby’s flat. Five months later, Greene went back to Moscow; he went again in September 1987, and then again in February 1988. He saw Philby each time.