Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...
Frank Carboni wrote:[commie]Nation andhonor are bourgeois constructs. So are standard of living, human rights, economic growth, truth, and logic.
Most American spies for the Soviet Union did it simply for the money. The British Soviet spies such as Philby, Blunt, et al acted as they did out of strong personal conviction. One British spy for the Soviets, Melita Norwood, was offered hundred of thousands of pounds by the Soviets over the years, all of which she refused as she believed the money would be better spent building socialism in the Soviet Union. She even used to lecture her KGB handler on his lack of commitment to the Communist cause.
Living their rest of life in Soviet Russia seems pretty harsh punishment, how could these British gentelmen lived without their clubs? They were Englishmen to bit.
and on his death was given a full state funeral in Red Square. That's a damn sight better than a retirement watch and an OBE, don'tcha think?
Arthur, you put my word about Ribbentrop–Molotov pact in your sig without even participate in the thread.
Let's talk about Poland vs Czechoslovakia. Ribbentrop–Molotov vs. Chemberline in Munchen. Not everyone got by British alliance with antisemitic Poland you know.
Russia lost 25 million lives, and suffered enormous destruction.
Living their rest of life in Soviet Russia seems pretty harsh punishment, how could these British gentelmen lived without their clubs? They were Englishmen to bit.
I dunno, Kim Philby seems to have flourished in the Soviet Union. He worked for decades training Soviet agents, was allowed to write his memoirs (which became a bestseller for which Graham Greene wrote an admiring foreword) and on his death was given a full state funeral in Red Square. That's a damn sight better than a retirement watch and an OBE, don'tcha think?
It may strain the analogy a bit, but after a lifelong romantic affair with the image, the fantasy of Soviet Communism, Moscow was still a mail-order bride for Philby until he came face to face with her in 1963.
Up until then, he'd enjoyed the best of both worlds. He could wallow in decadent bourgeois freedoms while maintaining a surreptitious self-righteous superiority over others who did, keeping pure his devotion to the promised bride. Then, in 1963, after his flight from Beirut, he arrived in Moscow and saw with his own eyes the ugly reality of the love object he'd worshipped from afar.
Not just the grim, disillusioning reality of Soviet life, but the shocking truth about his own status in the organization he'd dedicated his life to, the K.G.B.
"They destroyed him," the former K.G.B. man told me over the phone from Moscow. The man speaking, Mikhail Lyubimov, was among Philby's closest K.G.B. colleagues, the one who perhaps knew him best, the one with whom Philby shared the depths of disenchantment and doubt he'd successfully concealed from journalists and friends in the West up until the moment of his death.
Before speaking to Lyubimov, I'd listened to some 20 hours of tapes made in Moscow by Cave Brown. Tapes, for the most part, of interviews with key figures in the K.G.B. orbit around Philby's apartment on Patriarch's Pond in Moscow, men who'd shared his hospitality, his secrets and his doubts.
It's astonishing at first to hear these men, once possessors of the most closely guarded secrets of the century -- the secrets of the inner sanctum of the K.G.B., secrets men were murdered for knowing or seeking to know -- discussing them so freely, so offhandedly with a journalist. Astonishing to hear these men casually dissecting the Philby personna.
One can hear in their voices different degrees of affection, admiration, sadness and anger at the treatment of this man, who had come to be such a highly charged symbol. But the common thread running through all their memories and reflections about Philby was deception.
Not deception in the sense of the grand game of global psych-out that Philby's enemies envisioned him playing. "This is rubbish!" Lyubimov told me. It's a judgment former K.G.B Gen. Oleg Kalugin (Philby's boss in Moscow from 1970 to 1980) concurs in on Cave Brown's tapes. It's also one that the writings of Oleg Gordievsky, the British mole within the K.G.B., reflect: Philby wasn't running deception operations in Moscow. He was the victim of one, of a Soviet deception about the kind of life he'd be leading once he came in from the cold.
According to Lyubimov, this deception began in Beirut just before his escape to Moscow. While Philby was weaving a web of deceit around Nicholas Elliott, he was unaware of the one being woven for him. "When he was leaving Beirut, he was told he would be in Lubyanka," Lyubimov told me, referring to the Lubyanka headquarters building of the K.G.B., not the infamous prison in the basement known also by that name.
Others have reported that Philby expected to be made a K.G.B. general, that he expected to be named head of the K.G.B.'s England division. But, in fact, when he arrived, he found he'd been deceived in several ways: he was told that he was not and never would be a K.G.B. officer of any kind; rather he was an "agent," a hireling -- a lack of respect that never ceased to rankle him.
Not only didn't Philby get a rank, even more humiliating, he didn't even get an office.
"Any normal man who'd accomplished the feats Philby had would think he'd get his own study, his own telephone, a desk," Lyubimov told me. "It never happened. Nothing happened. He became a sort of a little beggar somewhere in a little apartment. It was three rooms but very small."
In fact, Philby's first seven years in the Soviet Union were almost a form of house arrest. Again a victim of deception: "The K.G.B. told him they were afraid the British M.I.6 was going to try to assassinate him, so he had to have guards all the time, close surveillance," Lyubimov said.
But the real reason was the Soviets didn't completely trust him not to bolt for home. "They were afraid something would happen. And he would end up back in Britain or even America."
"Did he know they didn't trust him?"
"Oh yes, he knew."
But it didn't take long after he arrived in the Soviet Union for Philby to realize he'd been the victim of another kind of deception, an even more profound one.
From the first, he felt "a complete disillusionment from Soviet reality," Lyubimov says. "He saw all the defects, the people who are afraid of everything. That had nothing to do with any Communism or Marxism which he had a perception of."
The Marxism that Philby "had a perception of" before his arrival was a variety Lyubimov characterizes as "the romantic Marxism of the Comintern agents of the 1930's." Of the daring "illegals," like the sexologist Deutsch, who thought of themselves as fighting Fascism for the sake of the future but rarely had to endure the reality of the future as it was embodied in Stalinist rule -- until Stalin brought them back to be murdered in the Purges.
The reality of Brezhnev's Russia, with its slow-motion Stalinism, was deeply demoralizing to Philby. According to several of the K.G.B. men Cave Brown interviewed, Philby was often dangerously outspoken in his open contempt for the Brezhnev regime. But was this because Philby was morally outraged by the system or because he wasn't given the place in it he thought he deserved?
Lyubimov, who tends to romanticize Philby, believes his distress was genuine. "The idea of the absence of freedom -- he couldn't understand it," Lyubimov told me. "He began to see it with how they treated Solzhenitsyn -- which he called disgusting. That was the beginning of his dissidency. Once we had a quarrel about the treatment of writers. Kim was shouting, 'Who is responsible?' And I was saying: 'Well it's not my department [ of the K.G.B. ] . I'm not responsible.' And he said: 'No! You are responsible! We are all responsible.' "
Kim Philby dissident? Cave Brown tends to believe, based on his conversations with the former K.G.B. men around Philby, that he may have played a role with other liberal elements of the K.G.B. in making Gorbachev's success possible. He suggests that Margaret Thatcher's early embrace of Gorbachev in 1984 ("We can do business together") might even have been prompted by information about Gorbachev's intentions passed to her Soviet affairs adviser, Nicholas Elliott, by Philby -- through Graham Greene's British intelligence contacts. Cave Brown advances the argument that, toward the end of his life, Philby was seeking "redemption" -- that fostering a Thatcher-Gorbachev rapprochement might have been the means for a reconciliation with the England he betrayed.
Cave Brown hedges his bets on whether Philby was doing so on behalf of his homeland, as an actual British triple agent, on behalf of reformist factions in the Soviet Union or on behalf of himself. The perennial Philby mystery again.
My belief is that while Philby may have hedged his bets in some ways, it's unlikely he was a triple agent. Indeed, he was extremely sensitive about being called even a double agent. Hated it, in fact. The way he saw it, a double agent betrays one master for another, while he, Philby, had only one master all along: the Soviet Union. He had no loyalty to the Brits to betray.
But I also believe Philby was engaged in an elaborate and desperate deception operation during his Moscow years, his last great intelligence operation. This was his campaign to conceal from those in the West just how badly he'd been deceived about the Soviet system.
One thing we learn from a study of Philby's Moscow years is that for all his contempt for the capitalist world, he had a pronounced, even unseemly, eagerness to be respected by the West, particularly by his fellow Brits. One thing he was not going to do was give them the satisfaction of seeing how badly the betrayer had been betrayed. Not while he was alive.
"He had a natural desire to have a pretense, to have a facade," Lyubimov told me.
The counterdeception-disinformation operation began with Philby's book "My Silent War," a masterpiece of overstatement through deceptive understatement. In it, Philby created a picture of himself as a cool, daring, nerveless, unflappable operator, who used only the driest deadpan understatement to describe his hairbreadth escapes, ingenious stratagems and clandestine coups. The conspicuous absence of boasting accomplished what boasting itself could not. And along with casually dropped references to "my comrades," his unfailingly brilliant and loyal K.G.B. collaborators, he painted a portrait of espionage superheroes, a team that had accomplished far more than he could ever speak about.
The truth was, he really wasn't on the team at all any more. Occasionally, the K.G.B. took pity on him, because it looked as though he was drinking himself to death in his despair, and gave him some quasi-operational tasks. For a few years, he taught an informal seminar on England to fledgling K.G.B. officers about to depart for Albion to try to recruit the next generation of Philbys.
Still, there was at least one instance when Philby's talents were brought into play. In the late 70's, Philby, who never lost his nose for sniffing out a mole, was called in to assess a K.G.B. intelligence disaster in Norway, a key agent blown. Given a sanitized version of the files to analyze, Philby contended he knew what went wrong: the Brits must have a mole in the K.G.B. who blew the cover of the Norway agent. In fact, he turned out to be right. There really was a high-level mole in the K.G.B., Oleg Gordievsky, although the Soviets were unable to pinpoint him until years later when, Gordievsky believes, Aldrich Ames provided information that clinched the case. Gordievsky barely escaped with his life.
But for the most part, Philby was frozen out, his suggestions ignored. "The K.G.B. was too stupid and impotent to make use of him," Lyubimov reiterated to me. "This destroyed him. This ruined his life."
And, in fact, the book "My Silent War," which had been one of the chief vehicles of Philby's deception of the West, became one of the chief instruments of torture the K.G.B. used against him. Philby desperately wanted the book, which came out in 1968 in the West, to be published in the Soviet Union -- to give him the heroic status with the Soviet public his vanity thought he'd earned.
"All this time, he wanted to be a hero of this country," Lyubimov says. "But they did everything to prevent him from this."
It took 12 years of delays, of brutal editing, of bad translations for Philby to get a mutilated version of "My Silent War" into print in Russian.
And even then, Lyubimov says, "It wasn't really published. A little edition, just distributed to the Central Committee, the military." It was, adds Lyubimov, "almost a confidential publication. He was killed by this."
And yet you wouldn't know it from the way Philby bragged about his book to Phillip Knightley in 1988: "It was an enormous success and sold more than 200,000 copies. The trouble was that I hadn't foreseen that it would sell so well. It was only in the bookshops a few days and then it was gone. So I didn't get enough copies for myself."
This is fairly pathetic, but at times Philby's desperation to be thought of as a success by his British peers reaches comedic levels. To Knightley, he described his Order of Lenin decoration as comparable to "one of the better K's" (degrees of knighthood), sounding like a pseud out of Evelyn Waugh.
And there was one point at which Philby's image-building campaign seemed to go beyond deception to an astonishing level of self-deception. The former C.I.A chief Richard Helms is fond of telling a story about an exchange between Philby and an American reporter in Moscow. The reporter told of a projected film about his life. Philby asked who was going to play him.
"Michael York," replied the reporter.
Philby recoiled, as if slapped. "But he's not a gentleman," he said.
Perhaps the single most telling instance of Philby's last great disinformation operation can be found in correspondence between him and Graham Greene over Greene's novel "The Human Factor." It was a book Greene wrote in the 60's but didn't publish until the late 70's because it came so close to the Philby affair.
Many found resemblances to Philby and his predicament in Greene's protagonist, a mid-level mole named Castle. Apparently, Philby did too. Greene had sent him a copy of the manuscript before publication, and Philby had made particular objection to one passage, at the very close of the book, when Castle, like Philby, has escaped to Moscow and is trying to adjust to his ambiguous position there.
The passage Philby objected to depicts Castle in a tiny, depressing apartment, amid stained, secondhand furniture, insisting over his malfunctioning telephone to his wife in London, that he's quite content: "Oh, everyone is very kind. They have given me a sort of job. They are grateful to me. . . . "
Philby wrote to Greene urging him to change this impression. It was misleading, melancholy. And, by implication, not at all like his circumstances in Moscow. Greene wrote back thanking Philby for the helpful suggestion, but he would not change the bleak mood.
Greene must have had the novelist's sixth sense from this exchange that the melancholy portrait of the lonely mole in his Moscow apartment, vainly boasting how "grateful" everyone was, had struck home with Philby. That there was a truth to it Philby recognized, a truth about himself that all the tacky ribbons and trophies he gathered from his "grateful" fraternal K.G.B. comrades could not obscure.
Shortly after Graham Greene's funeral, his biographer, Norman Sherry, visited the room where Greene had died. On a table next to the empty bed, he found the letter he'd written to Greene, the one asking for his final thoughts on Philby. Members of Greene's family said that they had found no reply.
If Greene took a Philby secret to his grave, it might have had nothing to do with whether Kim was a double or triple agent. It might have had everything to do with the lonely man in the Moscow apartment.
Perhaps Greene saw through Philby's last great lie, but -- unlike Kim -- he wouldn't blow a friend's cover.
Potemkin have you read this New York Times essay?
Loyalty to the man on the street eh?
Where does the Philby story really begin? Previous Philby literature has focused almost microscopically on the cloistered quadrangles of Cambridge in the 1930's, on the hothouse Marxist cells that flourished amidst the sherry parties and secret societies, on the overlapping erotic and political relationships amongst the privileged upper-class youth who were seduced by each other and by canny Russian case officers into what became known as "The Ring of Five," the single most deadly spy ring in history.
A fierce debate has long raged in Philby literature over the question of his true motivation: Was he driven solely by sincere dedication to the cause of the oppressed proletariat, as he claimed to be? Later on in the autobiographical manuscript, Philby gives us this pious version, perhaps designed for the eyes of his ultimate editors, the K.G.B.
From the earliest age, he says, he felt "a sympathy for the weak" and the underdog. The plight of the poor lepers. "Why," he says he wondered at an early age, "did Jesus cure only one leper when he could have cured them all?" Skepticism of this sort led him to question other established notions -- of nationhood and empire -- and, he declares, he "became a godless little anti-imperialist by the age of 8."
Up until then, he'd enjoyed the best of both worlds. He could wallow in decadent bourgeois freedoms while maintaining a surreptitious self-righteous superiority over others who did, keeping pure his devotion to the promised bride. Then, in 1963, after his flight from Beirut, he arrived in Moscow and saw with his own eyes the ugly reality of the love object he'd worshipped from afar.
From the first, he felt "a complete disillusionment from Soviet reality," Lyubimov says. "He saw all the defects, the people who are afraid of everything. That had nothing to do with any Communism or Marxism which he had a perception of."
The Marxism that Philby "had a perception of" before his arrival was a variety Lyubimov characterizes as "the romantic Marxism of the Comintern agents of the 1930's." Of the daring "illegals," like the sexologist Deutsch, who thought of themselves as fighting Fascism for the sake of the future but rarely had to endure the reality of the future as it was embodied in Stalinist rule -- until Stalin brought them back to be murdered in the Purges.
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