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. ee om Lhe Boe - te For 30 years before he skipped to — Russia in 1963, Britain's apper-crust ; agent H. A. Philby lived one of the most successicl—and treacherous—lies in all spydom, and London hasn't recovered yet. . “Lanpon, N January, 1963, Harold Adrian Philby, known to all as “Kim,” . disappeared from Beirut, where he was working as a correspondent of two British weeklies, The Observer and The Economist. Soon afterward. Edward Heath, then the Government spokesman, announced in answer to &@ question in the House of Commons that Kim had skipped to the Soviet Union. He added that, contrary to what his feliow spokesman Harold Macmillan had said in 1955, Kim was indeed the “third man” who had tipped off his fellow traitors Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in 1951, enabling them, toa, to defect to Russia. : h was only about a year agg that bits and pieces of evidence began to edd up. The clean escape of stil! another traitor, George Blake, from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in Landon i 1966 had been a pointer. Eleanor Philby. Kim’s last wife in the West. was now separated from him and feady to talk Tt locked as if we had underrated his importance as a double agent. The Sunday Times of ~Bondon started a worldwide investi- gation and hired me as consultant. Our report has appeared over the last month and has startled many people im the United States as well as Britain. To judge from Foreign Secretary George Brown's antics at the Savoy Hotel on Nov. I, it has startled him. So its worth saying —contrry to Mr. Brown's assertion then to The Sunday Times’ publisher and other diners that the report “helped the Russians’’—that it contained nothing which the Communists did not know already, though it probably had the salutary effect of showing them that we knew more about their subversion than they suspected On the other hand, it told the public in the West, who are not babies, some serious facts of fife which they have every right to know and to judge them- selves, OF course, the authorities would have preferred to continue to five a quiet life with those facts under the carpet, where they had lain for oo long. My Foreign Office duties in the Hineteen-fifties and early sicties had GEOFFREY MeDERMOTT ‘spent 27 yean in the British Piplomatic Service. He sow writes on foreign atom “2 MOVEMBER Ez. 1087 e 3 placed me fairty and squarely in the middie of the Anglo-American intelli- gence community. For some years I chaired the Joint Intelligence Com- mittee, which included representatives of our intelligence departments. Sir Patrick Dean, now British Ambassador in Washington, was my immediate boss. Representatives of the C.LA. sat in on our meetings, and in return the representative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise called MI6, was right in on the American intelligence setup in Wash- ington. Philby had been that man fram 1949 to 1953. in 1956, ] became Foreign Office adviser to the chief of the S.L5., Sir Dick White. This, as we shall see, was another crucial year for Phitby. AS a result of my position 7 was Jess bewildered than some by these chilling developments. I knew from experience that deception was one of the cardinal principles of espionage. Many of my best friends were spies —but sples in their own countries’ interest. While the public at large was stunned by the news, the authorites were clamming up. But portentous questions remained. Could this highly Tespected member of MI6 really have been a Communist agent at the same time? If ao. for how long? What about security> How did he get away with it in 1951, when the C.LA and the FEI as well as his own service were hot on his trail? Finally, what inspired a cultivated member of the British upper classes to do this bru- tally distuptive thing? It all made James Bond look like a milksop and his exploits like small beer. As with al of us, Kim's parents and upbringing provide some clues. His father, St. John Philby, a scholar of a top British school, Westminster, and of Cambridge University, as Kim was also, began life as a conventional member of the Indian Civil Service. Kim was born in India in 1912. But . St. John became decidedly eccentric as time went on. When I first met “him in Cairo in 1946 be had become the personal adviser of King Tbn Saud and a Moslem. He had been briefly ." interned in Britain during the war on grounds of doubtful Joyalty, and lived by preference in Saudi Arabia. His pormal-looking English wife told me that she was quite happy to put on the veil and live in the harem } emer ce we «meg ear ae "ak" ey eer a on . . : 1 ad ~ heard old St. John tell his son that be must always carry through to the bitter end whatever he thought right. Kim has certainly done that, and sur- passed his father im outrageousness into the bargain. | WAS at Cambridge im the early thirties with Philby, Maclean and Burgess—what » mob'—though I met fhem only when I was a diplomat in later yours and then only cesually. Looking back, I can see, with an effort, how the atmosphere at the university could lead to pro-Commu- nism arpong some inteliectuals. Brit- Ash society then was stuffy and con- Servative, The ruling Tory party was both pompous and ineMectyal; the Labor party just plain ineffectual. Hitler had appeared and no one was doing anything about him. War -was on the way and only the Communists seemed really interested in sverting it, Consequently, a good few intel- Jectuals turned to the extreme left, % DONALD MACLEAN—He, Burgers and | Philby were aff together at Cambridge ; in the cary thirties before going to work - for Moscow—in the British Government. _ ~ Qe Fae mnt - é without, of course, troubling to see how far real conditions in the Soviet Union justified their idealistic hopes. Few turned toward the United States because again out of ignorance, they tended to consider it temote from European affairs, brash and over-rich. Most of these men, having “gone “Communist” in greater or lesser degree, had the good sense to turn away again, but not Philby. He be- came not merely # Communist but a carefully controled Communist in- telligence agent in 1933, while stilt at Cambridge. Thus, from the age of 21, his life was wholly dedicated to two things: passing on to his Moscow - masters as Much valuable informatian 4s possible about Britain and the United States, and deceiving his friends and colleagues in doing so. It is difficult ta sey which gave him more pleasure. In other words, for 30 long years, Philby lived # lie every moment of (Continued on Page 136)