◆ SpookStack

eee (Continued from page 1) Communist party. Here, it is important to make a distinction between the security service of the 1 two states which fought the aide side. It js inconceiy able by side. It is inconceivable that the United States Covernment 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.S.S. 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.S.S. 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 C.1.A.), the Communist record was there. Yet British security permitted Philby to rise to the rank of No. 3 man in S.IS. and appointed him chief liaison officer with the C.I.A. ry to explain this stupidity except in hilby’s he was a member of the y's school school, . Philby’s father’s membership in the right sort BOOK WORLD Mey 17, 1968 of London club. The authors uy an excesses. yur 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 rets are imparted to @ friendly intelligence agency? The record now shows that America’s C.1LA. 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 difficult to decide when time relegates 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.1S. 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 Russian’ the information necessary to put them on the lookout for the U-2, When the U-2 ddly but penetrated foreign Enohowe and Khrushchev, Phitby had been gone CLA. wanted to know. So the damage Philby did to the American inteui- gence effort is still inestimable. What can be done t? The a sum up one side with appalling succinctness: “When the extent of Philby’s treachery was finally realized, the C.I.A. had no choice, short of disbanding the whole orgamisatian, but to smile bravely and carry on.” Still, by now, a law of diminishing returns must have set in for Philby. His value to the K.C.B, where he goes to work each morning in Moscow, must diminish 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 = 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 paper and people? The prospect seems as gloomy as the past. s