Ambala to Moscow

Last week, a comment in the Pakistani press headlined “Robin Raphel: the female Philby?” gave the initial impression that the American diplomat was being compared with the man who for years fed a steady stream of Western secrets to Moscow. That wasn’t the writer’s intention, though. The parallel he had in mind was with St John Philby rather than his considerably more notorious son, based on the fact that the British agent, stationed in Mesopotamia and Palestine as an employee of the ICS in the early 20th century, switched allegiance mid-career.

He wasn’t particularly surreptitious about it, though, given that he became a key adviser to King Ibn Saud without being viewed as a traitor in London. He remained sufficiently well connected, in fact, to facilitate his son’s entry into MI6. St John, who counted Nehru among his friends at Cambridge, had by then converted to Islam and taken the name Sheikh Abdullah. He later married a Baloch woman. His first son, though, was born in 1912 in Ambala, and nicknamed Kim after the Rudyard Kipling character. The latter’s biographer, British journalist Ben Macintyre, suggests that the first language young Kim learnt was Punjabi.

Macintyre’s bestselling book, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, testifies to a continued fascination with the highest-level Soviet mole to have penetrated Western intelligence. Philby was head of MI6 in Washington when he was summoned to London after Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defected to Moscow in 1951. He was obliged to resign his post and subjected to hostile interrogations by MI5.

His stoutest defenders included his close friends Nicholas Elliott, a fellow senior official in MI6, and James Jesus Angleton, a rising star at the CIA.  Angleton subsequently claimed to long have suspected Philby, but in fact he shared with him countless secrets that promptly found their way to the KGB — and his determination, after Philby’s defection in 1963, to embark on a mole-hunt within the CIA did lasting damage to the agency.

Back in the 1950s, no conclusive evidence could be found against Philby. He was rehabilitated after foreign secretary Harold Macmillan declared in Parliament that Philby wasn’t “the third man”. Appointed as a Middle East correspondent by the Economist and the Observer, he was also back on the MI6 payroll — and re-established contact with the Soviets.

The nature of the smoking gun that eventually emerged is one of the more remarkable aspects of the Philby tale. It took the shape of Flora Solomon, a friend from Cambridge whom he had once attempted to recruit as a spy. By the early 1960s, she was a committed Zionist and considered Philby’s articles in the Observer anti-Israel, which led her to conclude he had remained a communist all along. She mentioned this to an acquaintance with MI5 links — and set the ball rolling once more.

An infuriated Elliott decided to confront him. The idea, however, was not to bring him to trial, but to offer him immunity in exchange for a confession. The British establishment was determined to give the Americans the impression that Philby’s espionage had ceased before his US appointment.

No effort was made during or after Elliott’s interrogation to keep an eye on Philby, who was on his way to Moscow within days —- and, according to Macintyre, eventually accepted that this is precisely what MI6 wanted him to do. His relatively easy “escape” meant the KGB initially suspected Philby to be working for the British, but when he died 25 years later, he was buried with full military honours. As the Cold War revs up once more, there will be plenty of spy stories but they are not likely to be as extraordinary as that of Harold “Kim” Philby.

By arrangement with Dawn