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Cambridge Five Spy Ring — Part 26
Page 34
34 / 66
ee. —_——s
£28) Tr eeaictiaee bana at ae dd
aeli. i SHIyOMGry Ucpall ai uur
somewhel inside Philby. ; " | A contemporary recalls that bis stan-
_ He wastS!. He was born in India’! gard = speech—romantic, | Labour
and spent much of his boyhood there— .. fundamentalist in tone—invariably
hence the Kipling-esque nickname— -
apparently happily.
His father, St. Jobn Philby, then a
senior administrator in the Jadian Civil
Service, scholar of Hindi and other
languages, later the celebrated explorer
of Arabia, was always a dominant in-
fluence in his life. ss
To* judge from Philby senior’s
biography it was hard to differ-
entiate his exceptional ability and
strength of character from the imperi-
ousness of a highly developed ego, In
later years he made one of the first.
crossings of the Arabian Empty
Quarter, mapped out vast tracts of
territory including the Yemen-Arabian |
border, became ithe trusted adviser of
King Ibn Saud, turned Muslim, and
built up a substantial vehicle impo
business in Saudi Arabia,
He also became a Socialist of a
highly individual sort (for a while he °
oined Sir Richard Acland’s Common-
ealth Party), In 1939, at his own
xpense, he fought a by-election at
iythe on an anti-war platform, lost his
eposit, and was briefly interned under
18B for his disapproval of the war
effort.
Romanticism
. Kim admired his father greatly,
acquired many of his enthusiasms, some
of his romanticism and, so friends
thought, much of his integrity without
the arrogance.
Kim went to Westminster School and
was a scholar at Trinity, Cambridge,
like his father. It was the period of
strong left-wing fresurgence among
young men of his class, when Commun-
ism had a certain respectability and
when its objectives seemed hardly dis-
tinguishable from the Labour Party's.
Kim joined the University Socialist
Society (which included all degrees of
left-wing feeling. moderate
friend and contemporary, and Donald
Maclean, who came up to Trinity Hall
a year-latér, there was no sign—at lez
overtly—that he was a Communist.
Philby, in fact. went out to spea
for Labour candidates at election time!
eee ‘ -
Z
oe ke A Sis ee ee
lo ¢x- |
treme); but unlike Guy Burgess, his .
,, O.B.E, for his work. ©
began: “The heart of England does
- not beat in stately homes or on smiling
*Yawns.:... He was never heard to
speak a Marxist sentiment though at
*" the time it was perfectly acceptable to
‘do so. ' a
‘+-When he came down in 1933 he
- Spent a year or so travelling in Europe
“and studying German in Vienna.
| Another ex-Cambridge contemporary
: recalls meeting him in Berlin at a time
« When the Nazis were out in the streets
organising their first boycotts of
Jewish shops. Philby protested about
it to people on the spot ; “his, acquaint-
ances registered it as a sign of moral
courage.
“At Spanish war’
2 £rle
AE
* ism. - He worked in London on
Review of Reviews, a literary-
Political journal with no pronounced
"9950. Phi
ta
——7Afier this necessarily shado
period (but a crucial one in the eh
of the latest verdict on him) Philb
became successively First Secretary i
Istanbul and, in 1949, temporary First
Secretary at the Washington Embassy
|, where Barges arrived also, in late
4
|
‘doctrine, and was for a time its acting .
editor.’
‘In 1937, when he was 25, he went
The Times took him on as their cor-
respondent with the Franco side.
Here, any investigator searching for
to look at the Spanish Civil War and ;
» clues to some concealed, unknown —
te moves Corale if thare
we Pa, SEY, FE
BL th. ban
Uf ihey, Has GLEE
! were some extremism struggling to get -
“out it would be here, in Spain, where
‘the political passions of the thirties |
were concentrated, that it would
emerge ? Yet the then foreign editor
of The Times was later able to write to
-his opposite number on The Observer
praising the objectivity of Philby's
| reporting of the view from the Fascist
| that killed a fellow-journalist near by.
He was decorated by Franco,
‘¢+ With the outbreak of World War
. Two, jafier a spell as The Times war
‘correspondent with the B.E.F. in Nor-
work. He stayed in this until the end
_ of the war, part of the time in the same
* outfit as Guy Burgess, and got the
side. Philby was wounded by a shell -
mandy, Philby was recruited by the «'
Foreign Office for counter-intelligence’
i
by's duties were specially
concerned with security liaison with
the Americans.
‘Being shielded’
By all accounts Philby’s work was
highly regarded but it was not until the
_row over the Burgess and Maclean
defection of May 25, 1951, tnat ne
- emerged into a fitful half light of pub-
licity. In July, 1951, he was asked to
tesign from the Foreign Office because,
although cleared by British and Ameri-
can investigations of complicity as the
Third Man who had tipped off Burgess
- about the suspicion falling on Maclean,
it became known that be had had .
“ Communist associations " in the past.
It is still not known exactly what period
this referred to. Petrov, the Russian
agent who sought asytum in Austrakia,
asserted that Burgess and Maclean had
been recruited by the Russians while
still at Cambridge. There was never
any mention of Philby in this connec-
tion.
It was not until the autumn of 1955,
in the debate on the White Paper, that
Mr. Marcus Lipton named Philby in
the Howse and suggested that he was
being shielded as the Third Man. Mr.
Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary,
then cleared Philby in these terms:
“No evidence has been found to show
that he was responsible for warning
Burgess and Maclean... I have no
reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has
at any time betrayed the interests of
this country, or to identify him with
the so-called. Third Man, if, indeed,
there was one.”
Philby challenged Mr. Lipton to
-repeat his allegations outside the
Commons and at a Press conference
which he called he is reported to have
said: “1 have never been a Com-
Salu. area ager Se Ae
~ munist although ] have always been
a bit to the Left.”
It is understood that in an additional
effort to allay Mr. Lipton’s doubts he
was privately shown the security re-
port on which Philby's clearance was
based. What did this show? Last
summer Philby gave his own version
of the affair to a researcher gathering
mi
2 ME tee ote “a ¢ fone eal .
‘ oy we ee *“
oe MEE eg gh TN ‘~
wi pe
|
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