THE PHILBY FACTOR

The spy’s defection 50 years ago this month ended the dominance of the old boy network and forced the U.K. to rethink its role in the world, writes BEN MACINTYRE.

Fifty years ago this month, the Russian freighter Dolmatova steamed through the Aegean Sea en route from Beirut to Odessa in the Soviet Union. There was a single, middle-aged passenger on board, travelling with a Soviet passport that proclaimed him to be Villi Mattis. The man’s identity was somewhat undermined by his Westminster School scarf.

Two days earlier, he had been expected at a dinner party in Beirut hosted by a British diplomat, but failed to turn up. His disappearance had sent first his wife, then the diplomat, and then the British secret services into a roiling panic.

As the Dolmatova approached the port of Odessa, it was intercepted by a fast motor launch. Three KGB officers clambered aboard, carrying a bottle of cognac. Their leader shook hands with the passenger and raised a toast, in English: “Kim, your mission is over.”

Kim Philby’s defection to Moscow changed Britain profoundly and permanently in ways that are still being felt half a century later. It was a landmark year for many reasons: 1963 brought the Profumo Affair, the Beatles’ first No. 1 hit song and the Great Train Robbery.

But none affected Britain as radically as the discovery that Philby, once the darling of British Intelligence, the insider’s insider, a man of impeccable breeding, background and bearing, had been a Soviet spy for almost three decades.

From the moment Philby appeared in Moscow, to be awarded the Order of Lenin, Britain could never look at itself or the world in the same way again.

“A Rubicon had been crossed,” the former MI5 officer Peter Wright wrote. “To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like, or drink with, or admire, had betrayed everything; to think of the agents and operations wasted: youth and innocence passed away.”

Charming, stuttering, dependable, Philby had been privy to the most secret of secrets, the Crown Jewels of British Intelligence. He had risen through the ranks with unparalleled ease, becoming head of the MI6 section responsible for catching Soviet spies and then chief liaison officer with the CIA in Washington.

When he left the secret service and came under suspicion after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, he became a journalist in Beirut, but continued to work for British Intelligence. Throughout, he secretly passed on every scrap of intelligence to Moscow.

The MI6 damage assessment drawn up immediately after the Philby defection has never been made public, but according to those who have seen it, the document lays out with bleak precision the agents lost, operations blown and time wasted as a consequence of Philby’s monumental betrayal.

His defection did not become public for several months, but when it did the news set off a wave of paranoid mole-hunting on both sides of the Atlantic that wrecked many lives and continued for decades.

In his excellent book about the secret service, Gordon Corera reveals how in old age Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6 who had recruited Philby, was still tormented by “appalling nightmares” about the man once tipped to succeed him. That’s because Philby had done more than betray his country, he had betrayed his class, his culture and his club.

As always, John LeCarre puts it best: “Philby, an aggressive, upperclass enemy, was of our blood and hunted with our pack.”

Philby’s defection had a cataclysmic impact on British self-confidence. Coming on the heels of the Suez debacle, the treachery of a plummy-voiced product of public school and Cambridge seemed to symbolize the decline of a oncegreat power, the final ebbing of old imperial certainties.

Washington was as appalled as London and began to suspect wholesale

For the rest of his life, the British spymaster who recruited Kim Philby, at left in the early ’60s, was tormented by ‘appalling nightmares’ about the man once tipped to succeed him. That’s because Philby had done more than betray his country: he had betrayed his class, his culture and his club.

penetration of both the British and U.S. intelligence establishments. The special relationship was never again quite so special: Britain’s pre-eminence in the spy game was well and truly over.

Yet from the distance of half a century, he is no longer the bogeyman he was in 1963. Indeed, for all the short-term damage he inflicted on Britain, it owes him a peculiar but unacknowledged debt.

Philby’s defection forced Britain to confront its new role in the world. Once the debilitating mole hunts of the “dark ages” were finally over, MI6 emerged chastened but reformed, a modern intelligence service no longer dependent on the old boy network or living off wartime glories. The fierce and pointless rivalry between MI6 and MI5 (the Security Service) had enabled Philby to escape detection for years: the shock of his defection ushered in a new and lasting spirit of inter-service co-operation and integration.

Even intelligence relations between Britain and the U.S. became more effective. Philby’s betrayal marked the end of the old era, but also the start of a new one.

Philby’s flight to Moscow in January 1963 was seen at the time as a stunning victory for Soviet intelligence over the sclerotic forces of the Old World. That was certainly the impression he gave in his memoirs, a confection of truth, half-truth and calculated mendacity.

But did Philby really win? His life in Moscow was, for the most part, miserable, alleviated by British newspapers, always long out of date, in which he devoured news of cricket matches he couldn’t see. The KGB never trusted him. He attempted suicide. He drank himself senseless.

The world revolution he had fought for never happened. A few years after his death, the entire Soviet system collapsed. He had betrayed and killed for nothing.

At a press conference after his defection, Philby stood before the TV cameras blandly insisting he’d never been a KGB spy. Today it’s shown to MI6 recruits as a lesson in lying.

So this, after half a century, is what Philby has become — a training tool, a salutary warning, the icon of a brutal and failed ideology and a symbol of Britain’s transition to modernity. Inadvertently he ended up doing his country a signal service by changing it for the better.

It’s an epitaph that Philby, pleasingly, would have hated.