Treason in the Blood:
H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century
By Anthony Cave Brown
Houghton Mifflin, 677 pages, $29.95
Gentleman Spy:
The Life of Allen Dulles
By Peter Grose
Houghton Mifflin, 641 pages, $30
The intelligence services have fallen on hard times recently and these two books may help us understand why, although exposing folly, clandestine bungling, public befuddlement and official despair isn’t their intent. Their subjects, Allen Dulles and the two Philbys, father and son, are as different as night and day-the former an amateur in contrast to the latter two-but all three as improbable and puzzling in their private lives as in their deceptive public selves.
Probably no future biographer will improve on Peter Grose’s effort to detach the myth of Allen Dulles from the man, but what is more certain is that no one will add to Anthony Cave Brown’s superb portrait of the Philbys, whom he brings alive in all their bewildering complexity. Cave Brown has also identified one long-ignored piece of evidence that may make it possible to close the book once and for all on that baffling conspiracy, the Kim Philby affair, the brief standard version of which is as follows: Drawn to communism while a student at Cambridge and recruited as a Soviet agent in 1934, Philby joined British Secret Intelligence (MI6) during the war, serving in key roles, and later was MI6’s senior man in Washington. Having already passed on much secret information to the Soviets and done all sorts of other damage during the war, in 1951 he supposedly alerted fellow traitors Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean that the jig was up for them, finally fleeing to the Soviet Union himself in 1963.
Like Kim Philby, in a curious way Allen Dulles was never the man he was thought to be, and Grose’s biography tells us why. Although Dulles was given some credit for inventing the CIA-he didn’t, but then no one did; like any other Washington bureaucracy it grew like Topsy-in its early years he seemed to embody its mystique. Wise, benign, tweedy and pipe-smoking, he was a man we could trust in perilous times.
Dulles was a product of the Eastern Establishment and his virtue was his charm, not his intellect. He didn’t have an original mind and not a particularly inquiring one either. He had no passion for ideas, detail seemed to elude him, and it was those awful details-the Bay of Pigs fiasco-that finally helped bring him down. But then charm is the ease of dealing comfortably with one’s peers; gentlemen lose their way trying to understand those not born to the tradition or the more sinisterly bred, like Lumumba or Castro.
Dulles eschewed the temptations of money or sex in recruiting agents; idealism sufficed, which meant he was dead to the uglier spirit of his times long before he stepped aside, if he had ever been truly a part of it. His passionless detachment may have disguised a deeper irony, as did Kim Philby’s, but it was impossible to know what Dulles truly thought, just as it is impossible to know from his comments Grose cites from closed sessions at the National Security Council to inform us of his sagacity whether his ideas were his own or he was merely well-briefed.
There was something out of focus in Dulles, an ambiguity of character that Grose’s biography sustains and perhaps compounds. He respectfully lets the behavior speak for itself, but decent biographers, like gentlemen, too often forgive. A crueler view would hold that judging by his often callous treatment of his wife and his many extramarital affairs, chasing after women as he chased after rich men and reputation, Dulles was no gentleman. The cynical view would would have said the so-called master spy was little more than a dilettante dabbling in matters that far exceeded his professional, intellectual and moral competence but that reflected the folly of his time.
He didn’t rise above it, but then few did. The truth of Allen Dulles seems to be that he aspired to exalted rank, whether in diplomacy or statesmanship, and didn’t succeed. His vanity made do with what he got, the Director of Central Intelligence at Foggy Bottom, where he encouraged a legend and reputation he didn’t deserve.
Anthony Cave Brown casts a wider and more interesting historical net, illuminating the muddle of British Middle East policy between the two wars, the tribal antagonisms between the Hashemites and Ibn Saud, the politics of oil and, of course, St. John Philby, the Arabist, a true English original, like Burton or Doughty. But Kim Philby is his focus.
The Philby affair has been riddled with ambiguity from the very beginning and muddled further by the chaff thrown up from official sources, by intentional leaks and the confusion contributed by well-meaning amateur sleuths. One problem in dealing with Philby has been the rigidity or naivete of focus, as if Philby’s duplicity exploded on an innocent age like virgin birth, so anomalous in the enormity of its deceit that clandestine services on both sides of the Atlantic were struck dumb, their governments paralyzed.
This is far from the truth and totally ignores the historical background, in particular the strategies of deception perfected by British intelligence during World War II, which Cave Brown knows so well from his earlier books and which he exploits so remarkably in putting the Philby affair in context. It is impossible to make sense of Philby without some knowledge of those earlier tactics of deceit in which Philby’s services were also used; namely, the weaponry of disinformation or supplying the enemy with false intelligence so credible as to persuade him to draw disastrously wrong conclusions about tactical capability and intent.
It is also impossible to explain the Philby affair without also involving that enigmatic shadow, James Jesus Angleton, later the CIA’s head of counterintelligence. Angleton knew Philby from wartime London, met with him in Italy in 1945 following Philby’s return from Istanbul and his inquiry into the failed Volkov defection. As Cave Brown tells us, it was Angleton who chose Philby in 1949 from among the three candidates nominated by the British MI6 to be liaison officer in Washington, Angleton who met regularly with Philby in Washington. It is probable Philby’s Washington posting wouldn’t have been made without Angleton’s solicitation and possible that without Angleton Philby’s career would have drifted into decline and ultimately dismissal in some MI6 backwater, as it seemed destined to do in early 1949.
There’s no doubt Kim Philby was a Soviet asset. The question is whether Philby successfully deceived the British secret service and the CIA all those years (MI5 and the FBI are another matter) or whether both successfully deceived Philby and Moscow. If Philby flummoxed MI6 and the CIA until well after his recall from Washington in 1951, then MI6, the CIA and Angleton in particular were guilty of errors of judgment so staggering as to be incomprehensible. They are even more inconceivable given Angleton’s morbidly mistrustful character and the Washington environment circa 1947-51, when the merest whisper of communist contamination was sufficient to condemn anyone to oblivion and often did. But that crude, hostile environment was also an important player in further confusing the Philby affair.
If both the British secret service and the CIA knew Philby was a Soviet asset as early as 1944 or 1945, if not earlier-and the means by which Philby was so identified was probably more than mere hearsay supplied by Israeli or other sources, more too than MI5’s well-founded suppositions and undoubtedly more closely guarded than his service to Moscow (which may be why it is still undisclosed)-then Philby was undoubtedly used by both MI6 and the CIA and brought to Washington with that intent, to serve some higher operational purpose, which made Philby himself relatively small beer. The latter is the simplest, most logical answer under the circumstance of time, place, character and chronology and explains what otherwise makes no sense at all. Cave Brown has provided the details but doesn’t insist on the solution.
What would Angleton’s purpose have been? Obviously to resume in peacetime the tactics of deception that had worked so well in war. If one wartime purpose was to deceive the enemy about military intent, in peacetime disinformation serves to delude the enemy about your strength by disguising your weakness.
The years 1949-51 were uncertain and dangerously vulnerable for Washington. NATO had just been formed, Berlin was under siege, Europe’s future was unclear and so was Moscow’s intent. The USSR had exploded its first atomic bomb in August 1949, years ahead of schedule, and Truman was considering whether the U.S. should proceed with the hydrogen bomb. The future of U.S.-U.K. nuclear cooperation was also in limbo.
What could a CIA disinformation tactic have achieved in 1949-51? To supply Moscow through Philby, a reliable Soviet asset, credible intelligence disinformation about U.S. strategic and tactical capability, which would mislead Soviet leadership in its own policy decisions. At a time when the U.S. nuclear advantage was being derogated by Moscow, Philby would have been Angleton’s conduit for painting a broad picture of U.S. nuclear capability, including the devastative capacity of the Strategic Air Command.
If this was in fact Angleton’s operational plan, who would have known? Given the subtlety, secrecy and independence of Angleton’s methods, mind and imagination, very few. The primitive ideologues at the FBI would never have known; they would have greeted the notion with horror and opposed it every step of the way; so would the NSC. In short, in Washington at the time it would have been anathema even to suggest so radical and subversive a plan outside the CIA, but even there knowledge would have been restricted to a few.
One senior CIA deputy who was aware of it was Maj. Gen. Edwin Sibert, an experienced intelligence sophisticate, like the CIA chief, Walter Bedell Smith, who was familiar with the tactic. Silbert told Cave Brown in 1976-77 that disinformation had been Angleton’s purpose with Philby. There is additional evidence for such an interpretation, all circumstantial. Characteristically, Angleton himself left no audit trail.
Had Philby confessed to his treason after his recall to London in 1951 because of the Burgess-Maclean flight, Angleton’s ploy still would have gone undetected. Philby didn’t confess. He was allowed to resign and in 1956 moved to Beirut. In 1963, he fled to the Soviet Union or was permitted to flee after new evidence against him was gathered in the public domain to almost surely guarantee a trial. And who gathered this new evidence? The MI5 bloodhounds who, unlike MI6, knew nothing of the disinformation operation and, like the FBI, kept spoiling the MI6/CIA chase by treeing Philby.
Why was Philby permitted to flee? The popular notion was that the gentlemen of MI6 were sparing themselves further humiliation. The likely reason was that a trial might have forced MI6 to acknowledge why Philby had been so long retained after his loyalty had been in doubt.
One of the simplest and most revealing comments about Philby was made by Harold Wilson, who claimed “one simple fact I was given made sense of the (Philby) story.” Wilson didn’t disclose the relevant fact, but most probably it was that during those years Philby, with MI6 complicity, was being used by the Americans in an intelligence operation against the USSR. And what did the Russians believe? Cave Brown tells us that too in great detail.
Although Cave Brown cautiously refrains from any claim to having solved the Philby affair, he has nevertheless made it possible to draw the most logical conclusion under the circumstances. He moves from Washington to London to Moscow with equal authority, drawing upon sources never before cited, only occasionally being sidetracked by red herrings, windbags and gadflies. He is both a stalker and a scholar, and his marvelously quick prose brings excitement to the chase even when we are traveling familiar ground. He has written a remarkable book.
