◆ SpookStack

J rs | ‘(Continued from page 1) elle aaa NE ail a Oh am 1 he waa a member of the Communist party. Here, it is important to make a distinction between the security services of the two states which fought the war awainat fasniam aide le etd. Te ft. f4-—-2!---1 rs i | te 34Uc. AL IB inconceivable that the United States Government would have em- ployed a drunk of Maclean’s public renown or a man who boasted openly of his homosexuality as Burgess did. It is true that there were Communists in the war- time 0.5.8. Some of them performed bravely on tasks behind the lines befitting their peculiar allegiance, Gen- eral Donovan, who headed our wartime intelligence, said be was proud of them, but whenever he said so, he would name. their names, thus proving a point. If he missed a few, there was no one then to say him nay. But that was before 1946. After the Central Intelli- gence Agency took over from 0.5.5. in 1947, it would have been impossible for a Philby to have joined it. Why? Because Philby had joined the Communist party in his youth. No matter that he covered his tracks by feigning sympathy with Hitler and winning a fascist decoration from Franco (in itself enough to bar him from €.1.A.), the Communist record was there. Yet British security permitted Philby to rise to the rank of No. 3 man in 5.1.S. and appointed him chief liaison officer with the C.I.A. There is no way te explain this stupidity except in mms of Philby versity, Philby’s father’s membership in the right sort i ~ S sGeeeees yy 5 CRAAS yO UAE reey 2 Ey i t BOOK WORLD May 17, 1968 of Lendon club. The authors uu an excesen. poe © explaining what is really inexplicable to an American. But now comes The Philby Conspiracy’s final shock: What good is security within a secret agency if its sec-. cats are Stee Pa ow fete dle Lo. te Tels are WMpariéa to & AMY Dut pencirai¢a 10Tcign intelligence agency? The record ‘now shows that America’s CIA. was badly compromised. At the least, it was compromised between the years 1949, when Philby came to Washing: ton, and mid-1951, when he was recalled. At most, the record could say that the C.I.A. is still compromised. Philby knew the organization of the Agency. He knew its agents and its operations in the planning stage. Most important, he knew what C.I.A. wanted to know. To know this is to know a great deal. It would be dificult to decide when time relezates such knowledge to disused filing cabinets. Philby admits, for example, to one crime based upon information he gained in Washington. He admits to the massacre of hundreds of brave Albanians who parachuted into their homeland in the early Fifties, taking part in a joint C.1.A.S.LS. operation. He does not admit to an equally important crime, and the authors do not charge him with it. Nevertheless, in the opinion of this reviewer, it seems probable that Philby gave the Russians the information necessary to put them on the lookout for the U-2. When the U-2 went down, destroying the summit conference between ae SAN re akg Saree ary Bas Eisenhower and Khrushchev, Philby had been gone CLA. wanted 10 know. ste fay cae So the damage Philby did to the American inteili- gence effort is still inestimable. What can be done Mb Bee BA Se _ ahout 1? The authors enm on ona side with appalling abo IP PI & succinctness: “When the extent of Philby’s treachery was finally realized, the C.I.A. had no choice, short of disbanding the whole orgamimatiqn, bat to smile bravely and carry on.” .f Still, by now, a law of diminishing retarns must have set in for Philby. His value to the K.C.B., where he goes to work esch morning in Moacow, must dimini a little with each passing day. But we too are subject to a law of diminishing re- turns. In the days of Philby the intelligence community consisted of a top-level staff and some assistants. Since then, this community — Defense Department Intelli- gence and C.].A. — has grown to a vast industry spends about 2¥, billion dollars a year, employs & than 60,000 people and produces an amount of paper which God himself would have difficulty digesting even if He did not already know what the Russians were up to. The growth of our intelligence effort is surely one of the reasons why Philby’s value to the Russians must be diminishing. He could not encompass it all. But can we? How can we make sure that all these people and all this paper is secure? By hiring more people to watch paner and people? The prospect seems r F rr r is cr = i as gloomy as the past.. s