Kim Philby: My Silent War. The Autobiography of a Spy. Introduction by Phillip Knightley. Foreword by Graham Greene. (NY: Modern Library, 2002) 218 pp.
Like all my reviews, this one presumes you have already read the book.
Philby claims to have enjoyed good luck so consistent it never deserted him over an entire lifetime. And although this claim has been repeated by many reviewers and commentators, it too is part of his legend. The truth is that he was well-trained and professional, and it was these qualities – in addition to luck – that saved him time and again, as illustrated in the first chapter, about his narrow escape upon being detained in Cordoba. True luck would have been if the Spanish police had searched him and somehow missed the incriminating scrap of paper.
The real lesson of this episode is that even when cornered, Philby never stopped thinking of a way out, never stopped scheming. Years later, he did the same when confronted by his old friend Nicholas Elliott in Beirut, an episode not covered in this book. On that occasion, his seeming cooperation bought him enough time to arrange for his escape to Moscow.
Whenever Philby mentions luck, one’s antennae should go up. Here he is describing the consequences of his decision not to join the military. “I found that the best way to maintain my eccentric status was neither to agree or disagree; in face of my apparent total indifference, the subject was quietly forgotten. Long before the end of the war, I came to realize my good fortune. I was never inhibited by dreams of promotion nor by the envy of colleagues, and never had rank pulled on me by senior officers outside my service.” (pg. 32) When he later fell under suspicion for having rented a room to Guy Burgess in Washington, he writes: “It may even have been lucky that suspicion fell on me prematurely, in the sense that it crystallized before the evidence was strong enough to bring me to court.” (pg. 166)
In other words, part of Philby’s consistent strategy to explain his success is to call on good fortune; perhaps this is an example of British understatement. Lucky Kim, indeed. Be that as it may, the reader may wonder if perhaps he was not also the beneficiary of some advice from his Soviet handler, at least when it came to the decision regarding the military.
Much the same can be said when Tommy Harris suggested that Philby leave MI5 and go to SIS. “I decided at once to fall in with the suggestion, but I asked Harris for a few days to think it over. There might have been snags; in any case, I must rationalize my decision.” He then goes through a list of the advantages and disadvantages before deciding to accept the offer. He leaves out, however, what was undoubtedly the most important consideration: the need to clear any such move with his real superiors in Moscow.
So in Spain, Philby got away because he used the strategy of buying time by deflecting attention. As in London and Lebanon, luck was only part of it – the lesser part. “When it comes to a crucial situation, it is the experienced, cautious, methodical spy who has the necessary strength to stay cool and calculate risks wisely” (Markus Wolf: The Man Without a Face, pg. 125). Clever Kim.
Here is a passage that struck me on re-reading. Philby refers contemptuously to Soviet defectors, saying: “They were the ones who ‘chose freedom,’ like Kravchenko who, following Krivitsky’s example, ended up a disillusioned suicide. But was it freedom they sought, or the flesh-pots? It is remarkable that not one of them volunteered to stay in position, and risk his neck for ‘freedom.’ One and all, they cut and ran for safety.” (pg. 108) Note Philby’s repeated use of quotation marks to indicate his low estimation of bourgeois “freedom.” He claims that Victor Kravchenko, author of I Chose Freedom (1946), and Walter Krivitsky both “cut and ran for safety” in the West – did Philby do anything different when his time came, though in the opposite direction?
He suggests they both ended up disillusioned. Was Philby not himself disillusioned after spending some years behind the Iron Curtain? It remains an open question whether Krivitsky (died 1941, age 42) and Kravchenko (died 1966, age 61) committed suicide or were the victims of hit squads. Even assuming they did take their own lives, is it not true that shortly after My Silent War appeared (1968), Philby would himself spend time in a Moscow hospital, having slashed his own wrists? In short, while he speaks of his professional colleagues with disdain, the reader is struck mostly by Philby’s lack of self-awareness.
Here’s John le Carré on Philby, from his Introduction to The Philby Conspiracy, by Bruce Page, David Leitch, and Phillip Knightley (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968): “Deceit was Philby’s life’s work; deceit, as I understand it, his nature. ‘I have come home,’ he said in Moscow. Philby has no home, no woman, no faith. Behind the political label, behind the inbred upper-class arrogance, the taste for adventure, lies the self-hate of a vain misfit for whom nothing will ever be worthy of his loyalty. In the last instance, Philby is driven by the incurable drug of deceit itself.” (pg. 7) I have read this passage before, but the more often I read it the more plausible it becomes.
In these pages, he makes no mention of his various wives, or Nicholas Elliott, or le Carré, whom he once wished to meet. He passes over Albania and the Baltic states, where he was responsible for the death of many men, in silence. He utters not a word on his meetings with various top Nazis, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the sense of abandonment it led to among communists across Europe. To detail all his omissions, distortions, and outright fabrications would take more pages than I am willing to write.
Still, while this KGB-approved autobiography may be neither very revealing nor truthful, it is well written. As Robert Mackenzie has observed, “One of the most impressive things, although a superficial one, was the beautiful English of his reports. He wrote them out in longhand, in neat, tiny writing; he never did a draft first, yet the English was magnificent – never a word too many, never a statement open to two interpretations.” Here are some of my favorite passages.
“I have found that advertising people can be relied on for two things. First, they will warn you on no account to go into advertising; second, they will expatiate at length on the dirtier tricks of their profession.” (One of these advertising people may well have been Philby’s friend Tim Milne.)
“Our commandant, John Munn, was a young colonel of the sensible military type, as opposed to the no-nonsense military, the mystical military and the plain-silly military.”
“Ignorance and arrogance make a bad combination, and the Saudi Arabians have both in generous measure. When an outward show of austerity is thrown in as well, the mixture is intolerable.” (These two sentences, incidentally, were dropped from the East German translation.)
“I am sure that tribal courage is legendary only in the sense that it is legend, and that the wild mountaineer is as brave as a lion only in the sense that the lion (very sensibly) avoids combat unless assured of weak opposition and a fat meal at the end of it.”
Updates
Update 1: For an in-depth review, see the blog “Books & Boots” at astrofella.wordpress.com
Update 2: Related reviews at this site:
- Verne Newton: The Cambridge Spies
- Peter Wright: Spycatcher
- Robert Littell: Young Philby
- “A Different Loyalty” with Sharon Stone
- Eleanor Philby: Kim Philby, The Spy I Loved
- Ben Macintyre: Spy Among Friends
- John Miller: All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening
- Genrikh Borovik: The Philby Files. There I go into some detail regarding the translation of passages from My Silent War.
Update 3: A copy of this book was on display at an exhibition in Moscow devoted to Philby in 2017. See my review of Rufina Philby: The Private Life of Kim Philby, elsewhere at this site.
Update 4: My Silent War was included in a review of books about Kim Philby written by “Christopher Felix” (real name: James McCarger) that appeared in the NY Times, May 26, 1968: “… this book is an exceptionally faithful reflection of the man as we knew him. It is literate. It is wryly, sometimes delightfully, humorous. It is charming. [….] It is the work of a man who speaks with great authority of his profession. And it is an equally faithful continuation of what Philby claims has been his life’s work.” That is, deception. “As his book shows time and again, he was expert at inducing his interlocutors to think for themselves what he wanted them to think.” McCarger continues, “he betrays no remorse for the deaths of many men he arranged. When mentioned, they appear as fools or robots.” In sum, he calls it “a deft work of professional deception.”
Update 5: Talking about Guy Burgess, Philby states: “… he was very apt to get into personal scrapes of a spectacular nature. A colleague in the Foreign Office, now an Ambassador, had pushed him down the steps of the Gargoyle Club, injuring his skull.” This future Ambassador goes unnamed in My Silent War; very likely it is Frederick Warner (1918-1995). According to Denis Greenhill, the British Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and head of the Diplomatic Service from 1969 to 1973, Burgess once “explained his morning lateness in coming into the embassy by ‘sinus’ trouble, caused by a blow to his head, when a colleague (Sir) Fred Warner had ‘deliberately’ pushed him down the stairs of a London night club.” (Denis Greenhill: More By Accident [1992, pg. 73], quoted in Andrew Lownie: Stalin’s Englishman. Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring, [NY: St. Martin’s, 2015], 202.)
Editions
My Silent War was published in the UK by MacGibbon & Kee in 1968; because Britain has no first Amendment, libel laws there favor the party that claims to have been libeled instead of the author. Thus certain passages that could be found in the first US edition (Grove Press, also 1968) were omitted. Incredibly, the 2002 US edition reviewed here (Modern Library – a registered trademark of Random House ) generally follows the abridged UK version instead of the more complete first US. I say “generally” because for good measure Modern Library threw in some errors of their own that can be found in no other edition.
What does this look like in practice? First let’s take a look at the potentially libelous passages. Here’s an example from Chapter VIII, “The Volkov Case.” In the fourteenth paragraph, Philby describes having drinks one evening with Knox Helm, at the time British Minister in Istanbul, later to become Ambassador in Budapest. Philby calls him “prickly as a thorn bush” in mid-paragraph. The most interesting part, though, comes at the end: “Also of the party was the Military Attaché, who suggested that I should dine with him at the Park Hotel; he also evidently had his troubles with Helm” (pg. 125). Compare the more complete first US edition (Grove Press, pg. 146): “… at the Park Hotel. We had scarcely taken ten paces from Helm’s residence when he turned to me and said, “Of all the bastards…! He also evidently etc.”
Here’s another example, this time from Chapter IX, “The Terrible Turk.” Philby is describing his reconnaissance efforts in Eastern Turkey, far from Istanbul. He was gratified that this put him at some distance from the diplomatic corps, concluding the short paragraph: “Sir David Kelly, the Ambassador, now deceased, was a shy man with an acute and sensitive mind.” (Random House/Modern Library, pg. 141) The reader is left to wonder why Philby would want to maintain distance. The answer is provided when one looks at what he originally wrote. It turns out that this paragraph is short because it has been truncated. Missing are two memorable sentences: “… and sensitive mind. But his wife was an appalling female, the reverse of shy, distinguished by a mind both pretentious and pedestrian. I disliked her quite as heartily as any other member of the Embassy staff disliked her; and that was saying a great deal.” (Grove Press, pg. 178) This is a bit different from the Times obituary of her quoted at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(diplomat). A brief reference to her in the penultimate sentence of the chapter, where Philby mentions that he would again need an excuse for avoiding her, is also dropped.
Such emendations occur roughly once per chapter. Last time I looked, Modern Library, a division of Random House, was located in New York (it was only in 2013 that they merged with Penguin). So why is the American publisher adopting a text that follows British law?
What’s more, Modern Library introduces mistakes that are entirely its own.
In his Introduction, Philby criticizes newspapers for coming up with complex explanations for his decision to work for the Soviet Union where simple ones would have served them better. According to the Modern Library edition, he then explains: “The simple truth, of course, crumbling Establishment and its Transatlantic friends” (pg. xxvii). What Philby actually wrote was: “The simple truth, of course, was painful to a crumbling Establishment and its Transatlantic friends” (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968, pg. xxiv).
In Chapter IV, “British and Allied Intelligence Complex,” Philby includes some anecdotes about Graham Greene, who was briefly his subordinate. “Happily, Greene was posted, where I put him in charge of Portugal.” A high-school English teacher would circle the word “where” and add a question mark. What Philby in fact wrote was: “Happily, Greene was posted to my section, where I put him in charge of Portugal.” In transcribing Philby’s text, the editors somehow misplaced three words – hardly the worst of their errors. (Compare Modern Library 78; MacGibbon & Kee 58)
In Chapter X, “The Lion’s Den,” Philby writes: “CIA had lost no time in taking over the anti-Soviet section of the German Abwehr, under von Gehlen,* ….” To this is appended a footnote: “* Allen Dulles succeeded in acquiring ex-Nazi General Reinard Geblen’s [sic] private secret service in Germany for the purpose of infiltrating the Soviet zone.” (Modern Library 152)
These two sentences contain so many errors it will take some time to unpack them. First, the head of the Abwehr was named Reinhard Gehlen. As he was not a member of the nobility, Philby errs in calling him “von” Gehlen. This might seem like a detail, but it has consequences.
The subsequent errors are the fault of Modern Library. While the editor’s footnote correctly removes the “von,” it garbles the name: “Reinard Geblen.” Next, the index lists Gehlen not under “G” but “v” – for (incorrect) “von.” And to top things off, it offers a third spelling of the last name: “Gellen.” The result is that someone who wants to see if Philby mentions Reinhard Gehlen would have to be both persistent and lucky to find him in this edition’s index.
In Chapter XIII, “The Clouds Part,” a paragraph begins as follows: “I should explain that I had moved from Hertfordshire to Sussex, and was living in Crowborough, midway between Uckfield and Peter Townsend at Eridge. The reporters would cover the Princess in the morning and Townsend in the afternoon, or vice versa” (Modern Library, 191f). Readers may be somewhat startled by the sudden appearance of Peter Townsend and the Princess. Probably because of editorial carelessness, most of Philby’s intervening explanation has been dropped: “… Crowborough, midway between Uckfield and Eridge. By a lucky coincidence, I was not the only attraction in the neighborhood, for Princess Margaret was staying at Uckfield and Peter Townsend at Eridge. The reporters would cover the Princess in the morning etc.” (MacGibbon & Kee, 147). So in fact these two figures do not suddenly materialize out of thin air, but are properly introduced.
My advice: Find a used copy of the MacGibbon & Kee, or better yet the Grove Press edition, and read that. Write a note to Random House/Modern Library demanding to know why it is nowhere stated that this is an abridgement.
Here is the Grove Press cover:
© Hamilton Beck
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