◆ SpookStack

—_— —_— fell. Th mystery began and ended somewherg inside Philby. - He was!S!. He was born in India” and spent much of his boyhood there— hence the Kipling-esque nickname— apparently happily. wt His father, St. Jobn Philby, then senior administrator in the Indian Civil Service, scholar of Hindi and other ~ languages, later the celebrated explorer of Arabia, was always a dominant in- fluence in his life. . To” judge from Philby senior’s biography it was hard to differ- entiate his exceptional ability and | strength of character from the imperi- ousness of a highly developed ego, In later years he made one of the first crossings of the Arabian Empty Quarter, mapped out vast tracts of territory including the Yemen-Arabian ' border, became the trusted adviser of King Ibn Saud, turned Muslim, and built up a substantial vehicle impo: business in Saudi Arabia. ’ He also became a Socialist of a highly individual sort (for a while he joined Sir Richard Acland's Common- ealth Party). In 1939, at his own xpense, he fought a by-election at ythe on an anti-war platform, lost his jeposit, and was briefly interned under igh for his disapproval of the war effort. Romanticism . Kim admired his father greatly, acquired many of his enthusiasms, some of his romanticism and, so friends : thought, much of his integrity without the arrogance. Kim went to Westminster School and was a scholar at Trinity, Cambridge, like his father. It was the period of strong left-wing resurgence among young men of his class, when Commun- ism had a certain respectability and when its objectives seemed hardly dis- tinguishable from the Labour Party's. Kim joined the University Socialist Society (which included all degrees of left-wing feeling. moderate to ex- treme); but unlike Guy Burgess, his . friend and contemporary, and Donald Maclean, who came up to Trinity Hall a year-latér, there was no sign—at le: overtly—that he was a Communist, Philby, in fact. went out to speal for Labour candidates at election times \ A contemporary recalls that bis stan- dard = speech—romantic, -'fundamentalist in tone—invariably * began: “The heart of England does "not beat in stately homes or on smiling ~ ““Yawns,:...” He was never heard to speak a Marxist sentiment though at “the time it was perfectly acceptable to . do so. * * ‘+ When he came down in 1933 he ., Spent a year or so travelling in Europe “and studying German in Vienna. | Another ex-Cambridge contemporary Tecalls meeting him in Berlin at a time . when the Nazis were out in the streets organising their first boycotts of Jewish shops. Philby protested about it to people on the spot ; “his acquaint- ances registered it as a sign of moral courage. ‘ : “At Spanish war’’ . * After Vienna, Philby tried journal- ’ ism. «He worked in London on Review of Reviews, a literary- ne + Political journal with no pronounced : doctrine, and was for a time its acting «| editor.” “In 1937, when he was 25, he went to look at the Spanish Civil War and ; The Times took him_on as their cor- ;.Fespondent with the Franco side. Here, any investigator searching for » Clues to some concealed, unknown Philby, has to pause. Surely, if there were some extremism struggling to get ‘the political passions of the ‘thirties were concentrated, that it would emerge ? Yet the then foreign editor of The Times was later able to write to his opposite number on The Observer praising the objectivity of Philby's reporting of the view from the Fascist side. Philby was wounded by a shell - that killed a fellow-journalist near by. He was decorated by Franco, “2 With the outbreak of World War "Two, after a spell as The Times war correspondent with the B.E.F. in Nor- Foreign Office for counter-intelligence work. He stayed in this until the end _ of the war, part of the time in the same ,f. * outfit as Guy Burgess, and got the , 1, O.B.E. for his work. out it would be here, in Spain, where ., —rAftor this necessarily o period (but a crucial one in the Ligh of the latest verdiot_on him) Philb: became successively First Secretary it Istanbul and, in 1949, temporary First ” Secretary at the Washington Embassy Where Burgess arrived also, in late "1950. Philby's duties were. special concerned with security liaison wil the Americans. ‘Being shielded’ By all accounts Philby’s work was highly regarded but it was not until the row over the Burgess and Maclean defection of May 25, 195i, that he - emerged into a fitful half light of pub- licity. In July, 1951, he was asked to resign from the Foreign Office because, although cleared by British and Ameri- can investigations of complicity as the Third Man who had tipped off Burgess _ about che suspicion falling on Maclean, it became known that he had had “ Communist associations ” in the past. It is still not known exactly what period this referred to, Petrov, the Russian agent who sought asylum in Austradia. asserted that Burgess and Maclean had been recruited by the Russians while still at Cambridge. There was never any mention of Philby in this connec- tion. It was not until the autumn of 1955, in the debate on the White Paper, that Mr. Marcus Lipton named Philby in the House and suggested that he was being shielded as the Third Man. Mr. Macmillan, then Forcign Secretary, then cleared Philby in these terms: | No evidence has been found to show that he was responsible for warning Burgess and Maclean... I have no \ reason to conclude that Mr, Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called. Third Man, if, indeed, there was one,” Philby challenged Mr. Lipton to repeat bis allegations outside the Commons and at a Press conference which he called he is reported to have said: “I have never been a Com- ~ munist although 1 have always been a bit to the Left.” ae i that i ditional mandy, Philby was recruited by the - It is understood that in an additional effort to allay Mr. Lipton’s doubts he was privately shown the security re- port on which Philby's clearance was based. What did this show? Last summer Philby gave his own version ‘of the affair to a researcher gathering