Genrikh Borovik: The Philby Files. The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby. Edited and with an introduction by Phillip Knightley. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. 382 pp., ill.
This book, now more than two decades old, remains one of the most enjoyable – if not always reliable – books on Kim Philby. Writing in a thoughtful, at times skeptical tone, Borovik provides evidence for how the USSR could be its own worst enemy, as for example when it effectively blinded itself with the purges of the late ’30s. Institutional memory was wiped out to such a degree that Moscow Center had to ask surviving lower-level agents to remind them just who Philby and the other Cambridge recruits were.
Among the most interesting chapters are the ones where Borovik tries to lay to rest any lingering suspicions that Philby may have been a triple agent, only pretending to work for the Soviets while feeding them disinformation. While it is hardly surprising that “Sonny” was never completely trusted, professional skepticism is one thing, unremitting distrust another. Stalin suffered from the paranoid’s greatest fear – that of being insufficiently suspicious. So if Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the rest turned over nothing on British penetration of the USSR before the war, that was itself evidence of their duplicity. And if they turned over a wealth of evidence on other matters, that was simply more evidence of the same. Harboring doubts was a virtue, and acting on trust was in Stalin’s view “the sickness of idiots.” (pg. 213)
As it played out, Moscow first suspected Philby of being a German plant, then of working for the British. The re-direction coincided with the abrupt re-orientation of Stalin’s policy in 1939, away from hostility towards Hitler to cooperation with him, and heightened distrust of London. The implications were clear, at least to the cleverest intelligence analysts in Moscow Center, who made sure their views always stayed in sync with the shifting views of the leadership. They figured out what needed to be proved, and looked around for ways to supply the evidence. Something that has never happened in Washington, thank goodness.
From Moscow’s point of view, the passivity of the British was simply inexplicable. One who inadvertently fed their suspicion was Philby himself. Maintaining, as he consistently did, that the “SIS was not engaged in any subversive and espionage work against the Soviet Union” before 1944 was unlikely to persuade many people in the Kremlin. (pg. 193) And yet he kept on reporting what they did not want to hear and refused to believe. In these years, the main threats to agents such as Philby came not from British counter-intelligence but from their own Center, from “their own people.” (pg. 203) When an informant does not provide the information that is expected and desired, it is of little comfort to be proven correct years later. Some rehabilitations only came posthumously.
Borovik quotes words of wisdom from Philby, making him echo Graham Greene. “We tend to look for a solid logical line in the various cleaner decisions of the intelligence services. But every such decision involved the human factor. And that means that you can never exclude the possibility of a mistake, simple stupidity, as in chess. By the way, that is the great lack in spy novels, where the authors write their plots, even complicated ones, very logically. The most complicated logical construction is predictable and expected. These writers exclude the human factor, that is, error, in their work. There is only one writer who writes about intelligence with the human factor always present. That, of course, is Graham Greene. There is always some completely illogical, unexpected thing in his books. That’s why they are all so truthful and human.” (pg. 323)
So why question this book’s reliability? First off, there are problems with the translation. Borovik wrote in Russian of course, and his manuscript was translated into English – but the original version has never been published. This makes it virtually impossible to check the accuracy of the quotations provided here. Some of them, said to have been taken from the English original, sound very much like translations from Russian.
Let’s look, for example, at this one from near the end of the book. According to Borovik, in The Quiet American one finds this description of Pyle: “He is absolutely convinced of his righteousness and absolutely indifferent.” (pg. 372) To my ear, this does not sound like a sentence Graham Greene would have written. And indeed, though the absence of footnotes makes it difficult to check Borovik’s source, a perusal of the novel reveals no such passage.
What one does find, however, is Greene’s original – and rather different – sentence: “He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.” (The Quiet American. Text and Criticism, ed. John Clark Pratt [London: Penguin, 1996], pg. 163, near the end of Part Three, Chapter 2.) This is a key sentence in the novel, one that sums up Pyle’s character (one thinks of Orwell’s phrase from 1984, “protective stupidity.”) While “absolutely convinced” is an acceptable version of “impregnably armoured,” Greene’s “ignorance” has been turned into “indifferent,” which obviously is not quite the same. It seems that what happened was that Greene’s original text was translated (by Elena Golysheva) for the Russian edition of the novel: “Он был покрыт непроницаемой броней благих намерений и невежества.” Literally: “He was covered by an impenetrable armor of good intentions and ignorance.” That’s close to Greene’s original. But then for Borovik’s book this sentence was retranslated (by Antonina Bouis) back into English, with some resultant distortion.
In the years since the appearance of Borovik’s memoir, books have been published that cite this distorted version as being original Graham Greene. A Google search for the original of this quotation, for instance, led me to Roger Lewis’s Anthony Burgess: A Biography, which quotes Greene as having written: “He is absolutely convinced of his righteousness and absolutely indifferent,” but Lewis only adds to the confusion by saying this is Greene talking about Philby in his Introduction to Philby’s My Silent War (a complete red herring), not Greene writing about Pyle in The Quiet American! Thus do false “quotations” get into circulation.
Here’s another translation that does not sound authentic, from a note written by an unnamed deputy SIS chief: “The contradictions between Great Britain and the Soviet Union are as great as those between Britain and Nazi Germany.” (pg. 231) One would like to see the original document this is taken from. The whole passage (from which I quote only the first sentence) sounds like it was originally written in Russian and then translated into English.
On the other hand, Philby apparently did write the following: “To my mind, the purge and the struggle against Fascism and collaboration is the current tactical expression of the class struggle,” so perhaps he felt comfortable using such vocabulary. (See Gordon Carera: The Art of Betrayal [NY: Pegasus, 2012], pg. 66, quoting from an unpublished note from Philby to Roger Hollis at MI5.)
Next, take the version of Philby’s lecture to KGB officers which Borovik alleges he delivered at their club in 1977. According to his summary, Philby “talked about the five-year plan he had developed for himself before leaving for Istanbul as the SIS chief in Turkey,” a schedule that was later put aside due to the pressure of work. He goes on to joke about being “certain that this could never have happened at the KGB, where planned work was the basis of everything.” Borovik adds, “The response of the 500 agents in the audience was a roar of laughter.” He concludes by having Philby say he knew that the Moscow “Centre undoubtedly needed him.” (pg. 362)
All this bears little resemblance to the lecture that Philby actually presented. Let us leave aside the minor error of location (it was delivered at KGB headquarters in Yasenevo, in Moscow’s suburbs, not the officers’ club downtown, which would be the site of his wake in 1988). More importantly, the original 14-page text, based on Philby’s own typescript and printed in Rufina Philby’s memoir The Private Life of Kim Philby (2000), differs markedly from the summary provided by Borovik. In fact, about the only point of similarity is that in both versions Philby told a joke which went over well. So either there were two different lectures (something no one has ever maintained), or there is some disinformation here. (See below, Update October 2017)
Likewise Borovik’s claim that Graham Greene “had never visited” the Soviet Union before 1986. This absurd allegation is easily refuted. The truth is, as W.J. West confirms in The Quest for Graham Greene (1997): “he had visited Moscow on many occasions, in the 1950s and 1960s, and as recently as 1971….” If Borovik did not know this, then a concerted, multi-sided effort was made to conceal it from him. To what purpose? West speculates “it was perhaps [the KGB’s] way of putting the past behind it as it turned to face the Gorbachev-inspired dawn.” (pg. 252) West’s suggestion that the KGB may have misled Borovik fails to explain why Greene and Philby himself allegedly went along with this deception.
It may look as though Borovik is dissembling, though there is another possibility: His sources misled him. According to Oleg Kalugin, when Borovik was commissioned to write an article to appear in the press, he would often demand to know from the KGB if the story was true or not, and refused to write it without receiving such assurances. Unfortunately, when they really wanted to pass on false information, they simply lied to him. (The Private Life of Kim Philby, pg. 333 n. 72)
Once one starts looking at this book more closely, errors start appearing everywhere. Even the index is unreliable. Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, appears there as a “Field-Marshal.” Stewart Menzies, a moderately important figure (also known as “C”), is listed there only three times, though in the text itself he appears much more often – and his is far from the only such case.
In short, The Philby Files is a good read, as long as you don’t probe too deeply into the details. While his book may be vivid, on some matters Borovik was misinformed at best. Neither the story nor the translation nor even the index can be considered 100% reliable. Use with caution.
Update 1
On three occasions in The Philby Files, Borovik quotes from Kim Philby’s My Silent War. Here is the first: “It was an idiotic situation! If all my operations against the Soviet Union and the Communist movement failed every time, I would soon be fired. If I achieved success every time, I could do significant damage to the Soviet Union. There was no single way out of the situation. In every case I had to make a decision.” (pg. 237) While this does sound like something Philby would say, no reference is given, and I cannot find any such passage in My Silent War. There is, however, a very similar thought in Phillip Knightley’s Introduction: “[Access to Venona] put Philby in a difficult and dangerous position. What should he do as he followed the FBI’s homing in on his Soviet intelligence service comrades? If he were to use his knowledge of Venona to warn those most at risk so they could flee, the FBI would suspect a leak. It would investigate everyone who had had access to Venona, including Philby, and he would never again enjoy the same degree of confidence. He made a brutal decision – he would tip off those agents who were of most importance to Moscow and sacrifice the others.” (Introduction to My Silent War [NY: Modern Library, 2002], pg. xiv) Note that in the passage quoted by Borovik, Philby omits any reference to Venona, and glides over exactly how he made his choices. Knightley – having spent many hours in conversation with Philby – forthrightly states what Philby only implies. So why is this passage not included in My Silent War? Knightley again: “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 [Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, 1968] 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.” (Introduction, pg. ix) It seems likely that Borovik had access to, and quoted from, the uncut version.
The second quotation is a bit longer, and begins: “Several times in this period, I revived the idea of escape.” (pg. 310) The original can be found in My Silent War (pg. 190), identical in every detail except for a single word. Where Philby had written, “I received, through the most ingenious of routes, a message from my Soviet friends, conjuring me to be of good cheer and presaging an early resumption of relations,” (italics added) Borovik replaces “conjuring” with “encouraging.” While hardly earth-shaking, why not leave the original untouched? Isn’t it more work to make this change than keep the sentence as it was? Was he working from a draft, not Philby’s final version?
Finally, let’s look at this paragraph from Chapter 32 of Borovik (pg. 322): “Despite these dramatic events my work abroad had not yet ended at the time. From 1956 to 1963 I was in the Middle East. The Western press published much speculation about that period of my work, but for the time being I leave it on the consciences of the authors. Actually, the British and American special services can reconstruct pretty accurately my activities up to 1955, there is positive and negative evidence that they know nothing about my subsequent career in Soviet service. The time will come for another book in which I will tell of other events. At least Soviet intelligence was interested in knowing the subversive activities of the CIA and SIS in the Middle East.” Identical passages, but without the italicized words, can be found in My Silent War. (pp. 198-199)
What we have in this, as in the previous example, is part Philby-as-published, and part something else – perhaps an earlier version? Yet it is hard to believe that even in a draft, Philby would have written something as ungrammatical as, “Actually, the British and American special services can reconstruct pretty accurately my activities up to 1955, there is positive and negative evidence that they know nothing about my subsequent career in Soviet service.” In fact, in My Silent War he wrote, “The compelling reason for discussion at this point is that, while the British and American special services can reconstruct…” etc. (pg. 198) In other words, in My Silent War he wrote a normal English sentence, whereas in Borovik this is amended to something rather awkward.
Though the truth value of Philby’s memoirs may be close to nil, one still should not fiddle with the text.
Update 2
Regarding the lecture Philby delivered to the KGB in July 1977, in the fall of 2017 there was an exhibition devoted to Philby at the State Archives in Moscow which I was able to visit. “Among Mr. Philby’s personal papers now on display is the handwritten text of a message he sent to K.G.B. officers in 1977, the 100th anniversary of Dzerzhinsky’s birth. Hailing Dzerzhinsky as ‘your great founder,’ he wished Soviet secret service officers ‘every success in your important and responsible labors’ and expressed hope that ‘may we all live to see the red flag flying on Buckingham Palace and the White House.’ ” (See New York Times, “Even in Death, the Spy Kim Philby Serves the Kremlin’s Purposes,” by Andrew Higgins, Oct. 1, 2017)
The references to Dzerzhinsky as “your [or our] great founder” and “your important and responsible labors” can be found in Rufina Philby’s The Private Life of Kim Philby (pp. 245 & 258), though I find there no mention of Buckingham Palace or the White House. Apart from that detail, the exhibition seems to uphold the version printed in Rufina’s book, which supports the claim that she is more reliable than Borovik.
Related reviews elsewhere at this site:
- Robert Littell: Young Philby
- “A Different Loyalty” with Sharon Stone
- Eleanor Philby: Kim Philby, The Spy I Loved
- Ben Macintyre: A Spy Among Friends
- John Miller: All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening
© Hamilton Beck
Items from Mr. Philby’s personal collection and from the K.G.B. on display at an exhibition in Moscow organized by the Russian Historical Society. Credit James Hill for The New York Times
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