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Cambridge Five Spy Ring — Part 26

66 pages · May 09, 2026 · Document date: Apr 19, 1956 · Broad topic: Intelligence Operations · Topic: Cambridge Five Spy Ring · 66 pages OCR'd
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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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