Kim Philby (2 page)

This is not a researched book. I have no documents or letters, and no access to unpublished material. It is many years since I had anything to do with intelligence work. I write from memory, jogged here and there by books and articles already published, though there must be many I have not read. On several points of wartime detail where my recollection differed from existing accounts I consulted former intelligence colleagues, long retired.

The original
Sunday Times
articles of 1967 published for the first time many of the basic facts about Philby’s career. Although these articles caused some publicity difficulties for me at the time, I thought the
Sunday Times
helped to establish a valuable point of principle, which I fully support: provided its current and future work is not seriously handicapped, a secret service has no right to permanent immunity from public scrutiny and
criticism; it cannot expect that faults and errors should be hushed up indefinitely.

In my own book, the first nine chapters (excluding Chapter 4, which is largely autobiographical) describe chronologically my acquaintance with Kim Philby from our first meeting in 1925 to our last in 1961. I have tried as far as possible not to duplicate what others have written, but to rely on my personal recollections. However, there were several periods of his life of which I knew little at first hand, notably Cambridge, the Spanish Civil War, Washington and Beirut; to the small extent I have touched on these I have usually drawn on other accounts. But for the most part I have described things as I saw them at the time, with occasional passages of hindsight. The period 1941–45 and the Iberian subsection of Section V of the Secret Service, in which he and I worked, are treated in some detail. I have freely discussed wartime intelligence matters, as have many others; but post-war intelligence, for the most part, is mentioned only in passing. Chapter 12, without pretending to be a deep analysis of Kim Philby, man and spy, offers some thoughts on his motives and personality.

I do not agree with several writers who have stated that Philby was essentially an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation; rather, I would say, he was an unusual man who sought and found an unusual situation. Nor, from what I saw of Kim and St John Philby, do I believe the theory of the domineering or dominant father.

I have tried to avoid either condemning or condoning what Kim did. This is not because I have no strong views, but because I am trying to write a factual account of what I knew of him. It would only confuse things if I were to hold a moral indignation
meeting every few paragraphs. If the personal picture I have presented is friendlier than several others that have appeared, well, that is how I saw him.

Tim Milne

Author’s note

The Soviet organisation which Philby joined in the 1930s had many titles before settling down in 1954 as the KGB. I have not attempted to follow these changes, which would merely confuse the reader, not to mention the author. Where the context requires, the term KGB should be considered to include its predecessors, and the term NKVD its successors; the intervening titles have not been used.

I have referred throughout to SIS, not MI6; and to MI5, not the Security Service.

Notes

1
. Kim Philby,
My Silent War
, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1968.

1

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLBOY

S
eptember, 1925. A very small boy is happily trying to squash a bigger boy behind a cupboard door. Another small boy, me, is watching with some alarm.

That is my first memory of Kim Philby. An hour earlier I had been deposited at 3 Little Dean’s Yard, one of the new batch of King’s Scholars at Westminster School. Kim, although only six months older than me and still diminutive in his Etons,
¹
was beginning his second year. The forty resident King’s Scholars formed a separate house, called College, which in some ways was a kind of school within a school, with its own traditions, rules, clothes and vocabulary. The juniors, as scholars in their first year were called, had a fortnight to master these mysteries. During this time each junior was assigned to the care of a second-year scholar, who not only would be his mentor but would take the rap for any sins committed by his protégé. My own mentor was now ignominiously pinned behind the cupboard door, and I wondered – unjustly as it turned out – what good he would be to me if he could not manage this small pugnacious fellow with a stammer.

Kim was the only person in College, and almost in the entire school, that I had heard of before. Over a period of about a
decade at the turn of the century, my father and his brother Alan, and Kim’s father, St John Philby,
²
and his father’s brother, had all been at Westminster, the first three in College. St John Philby had earlier been a pupil in the 1890s at a preparatory school of which my grandfather J. V. Milne was founder and headmaster. (In his autobiography,
³
he says, ‘I cannot but feel that in J. V. Milne we enjoyed the guidance of one of the greatest educators of the period – certainly the greatest of all who crossed my path.’) The two families had been acquainted, but had drifted apart. I had never previously met any of the Philbys but my father had told me to look out for Jack Philby’s son.

Books and articles on Kim have made much of his public school background. Some accounts have implied that he was very much a product of the system and, that when suspicions of him arose, the system closed ranks and succeeded in protecting him for several years. In fact Westminster at this time, and particularly College, were not very typical of public school life, and Kim himself was highly untypical even of Westminster.

The school was not just in London, but in the very centre of London, closely linked with Westminster Abbey, which was our school chapel. (I must have attended between 1,200 and 1,500 services there in my time.) Two-thirds of the rather small complement of 360 pupils were day boys, and of the boarders (who included all the resident King’s Scholars) most lived in or near London; Kim’s house was in Acol Road, in West Hampstead. I myself, living in Somerset at the time, was one of the few boarders who could not go home at weekends. This was not a self-centred school, divorced from the outside world. It was also not one of the most successful schools, by the usual criteria of the time. We did not get many university scholarships, apart
from our closed scholarships and exhibitions to Christ Church, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge. Unsurprisingly, with our small numbers and relative lack of playing fields on our doorstep, we were not too good at games. And socially we were not quite on a level with Eton, Harrow and one or two others.

But Westminster was an unusually humane and civilised place. There was room for a hundred flowers, if not to bloom, at least not to be trampled on. Eccentrics were prized, particularly if they made you laugh. In College, and perhaps in other houses, there was little or no bullying; the small boys tended to take advantage of this by taunting and tormenting the larger or older ones, as a puppy might an Alsatian. It was not a sin to be a dud at games, and there was in any case the alternative of the river; you can’t be a dud at rowing. In College, administration and discipline were mainly in the hands of the monitors, who had the power to cane juniors and second-year boys – usually for trivial offences. The fear of being caned was real enough in my first two years, but I was caned only once, and I’m not sure that it happened to Kim at all. There were many rules and restrictions, but once you reached your third year most of them ceased to apply.

Some accounts have suggested that Kim had a bad time at school. I would say he had a rather easy life, particularly in his later years. He was never a popular figure, but neither was he unpopular. People accepted that he was something of a loner, who had erected barriers around himself, and were not disposed to ill-treat him or try to knock him into a different shape. There was little hint at this time of the convivial and gregarious Kim of the 1940s. He had something untouchable about him, a kind of inner strength and self-reliance that made others respect him. Nobody ever mocked him for his stammer. But between Kim
and perhaps half a dozen people there was a strong mutual antipathy. This was notably true in the case of our housemaster, the Reverend Kenneth Luce. He did not have a lot to do with our daily routine – he came more into my life as a form master for two terms than as housemaster at any time – but he made a strong impression on us; whether it was of Christian dedication and moral fervour or of sanctimonious self-righteousness depended on your outlook. Once from my nearby cubicle I heard him trying to persuade Kim that he ought to be confirmed. Kim let him carry on for several minutes before revealing that he had never even been baptised. Luce, recovering, tried to shrug it off by saying that that could easily be arranged, but thereafter it seemed that he never pursued the subject with the same drive; perhaps he reckoned that he would have to convert the parents as well as the boy.

One account I have read describes the battle for Kim’s soul in much more dramatic terms. Kim was ‘badly mauled in the struggle’ and later allegedly claimed to have suffered something like a nervous breakdown. I find this hard to accept. He seemed to have little difficulty in holding his position as one who was prepared (because he had no choice) to attend services, but not to go further than that. He certainly did not change his beliefs: he allowed that the prayer book had some value as a ‘handbook of morality’ but nothing more. Luce himself was a so-called Modern Churchman (he had been chaplain to Bishop Barnes of Birmingham), which in some people’s eyes was halfway to agnosticism, and was perhaps inclined to take a less dogmatic view than other headmasters in Orders might have been.

Kim was not brilliant at school. No doubt he was handicapped at the start by his youth – he was only twelve and three-quarters
when he entered in 1924 and might have done better to have waited another twelve months – and by ill health in his first year. Scholars were expected to pass School Certificate at the end of their first year, or their second at the latest, but Kim took three years to get over this hurdle. I have a school list from Lent term 1927 – his eighth – which shows him still in the Shell (the School Certificate form); he is placed fifteenth out of twenty-three boys, a little below a later Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford but above a later Bishop of London. He had only two years left after School Certificate, but in those two years caught up rapidly.

College, although the smallest house and consisting entirely of King’s Scholars, was rather good at games. Kim, while far from outstanding, was by no means a rabbit. If he had not abandoned games in his final year – an option available to a senior – he might have made a reasonable mark at soccer and cricket. He was a fair goalkeeper. At cricket he played in the school 2nd XI – I recall especially his bowling action: front facing, round arm, head and chin raised high as if he were peering over a wall, and with a distant air of meditation even at the moment of releasing the ball. He used to field on the offside. I wish I could report that his regular position there was third man, but I think he was more usually to be found at deep extra cover – itself appropriate in its way. Like many of us King’s Scholars, he played a lot of Eton fives. The gymnastic prowess ascribed to him in one account has vanished entirely from my memory, but he was a keen boxer. I have documentary evidence – rare in this narrative – to show that he was in the team that boxed against Tonbridge School in March 1928, and was beaten. ‘Philby got off with a thick ear, against Campbell, who was at least half a foot taller than himself. He was handicapped by a shorter reach than that of his
opponent, and was on the defensive most of the time.’ Kim was not often on the defensive, then or later.

Unlike practically everyone else in College, and indeed in the school, Kim never joined the Officers’ Training Corps. Thereby he saved himself not only a good deal of trouble, but also the appalling discomfort of the uniform of those days, invariably known as ‘the million’ for some facetious reason to do with fleas. I am not sure why Kim stayed out of it. He can hardly have taken up a pacifist attitude at the age of twelve. Perhaps it was simply an offshoot of St John Philby’s non-conformist philosophy. I, with one or two others, left the corps at the end of my third year for pacifist reasons, but I will not deny that a secondary motive was the alternative it gave me of playing fives on the two corps afternoons, Wednesday and Friday. Probably it was on those afternoons that Kim was to be found in the gymnasium.

He was prankishly inclined. One evening, in his ‘box’ or small partitioned-off study, he had the idea of baring the wires of his reading lamp, connecting them to drawing pins and inviting several of us to give ourselves mild shocks; why we were not electrocuted I do not understand. Later, during prep, there was an enormous blue flash from Kim’s box. The lights went out all over College, and, or so we believed, over a large part of the City of Westminster as well. By the time the candles arrived, Kim had managed to conceal all evidence of his misdeeds, and the cause was duly diagnosed as a faulty reading lamp.

Kim had a considerable sense of humour, but in some ways a peculiar one. Much that others found funny he did not. He displayed more than a hint of
schadenfreude
, a characteristic that remained with him all the time I knew him. He derived a fairly harmless enjoyment from the discomfiture of others, and had
a mocking tongue; but he was never one to bully the smaller or weaker – his targets were usually larger than himself.