Kim Philby: a traitor and a gentleman

Kim Philby was sweet, kind – and a drunk, cold-hearted liar. By James Hanning

Kim Philby (1912-1988) was born 110 years ago this coming New Year’s Day. His early years were influenced by a remote, domineering and often absent explorer father – the cause of his stutter, he claimed. Affronted by the injustices of the 1930s, he became fired with indignation at the treatment of the downtrodden – and what he assumed was the British government’s willingness to collude with the even more oppressive forces of fascism.

So far, so understandable. Lots of people joined the Labour Party or the Communist Party. Between 1933 and 1938, membership of the Cambridge University Socialist Society increased fivefold. But Philby was in a hurry. He had visited Germany with his lifelong friend Tim Milne and saw the dawn of the Third Reich with his own eyes.

He had seen the brutality of Chancellor Dollfuss’s Vienna and had helped those on death lists escape. He had also been introduced to Otto Deutsch, the Russian spy who recruited Philby. Deutsch was to be the role model the sensitive, impressionable Philby might have hoped his brilliant, conceited father would be.

Deutsch, said Philby, was a ‘simply marvellous man’ with a love of and interest in people. That interest was ‘sincere, unfeigned’.

Philby said of Deutsch, ‘The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life and more interesting than you and talking to you existed at that moment.’ He was ‘a kindly alien’, and had a marvellous education, humanity and a fidelity to building a new society with new human relations.

This warm, human figure – so far from the wintry apparatchik one might imagine – was the one who gave direction and meaning to the amiable Philby’s exceptional analytic gifts. It was Deutsch who persuaded the well-connected Philby (Westminster and Cambridge) that he could be more effective operating in secret. As Deutsch put it, ‘An avowed Communist can never get near the real truth, but somebody moving as real bourgeois among bourgeois could.’

But why did Philby do it? Because he could. He possessed an extraordinary gift for mendacity. Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky went further, and said he had ‘a compulsion to deceive those around him’.

And, to Philby, those lies were for the most part told in a noble cause – the fight against fascism and the building of an optimistic political world where human goodness could prosper in defiance of baser instincts. That the midwife of this sunny new world was Joseph Stalin makes that hope seem all the more futile.

And, as Philby’s opponents are quick to point out, this is not mere hindsight.

There was mounting evidence, as the 1930s progressed, of Stalin’s show trials and the murdering of his own people. Yet, apart from a wobble over the Hitler-stalin pact, Philby’s faith never wavered.

Philby had little need for approbation of his cause. The 1930s had crystallised his mind – only patience was needed after the war. Some (Gide, Koestler and Spender) saw Communist failures as, at best, the naïve bunglings of a god that failed. Philby saw Communism as a continuing work in progress.

He told his American wife, frustrated by the obstructiveness of Soviet bureaucracy, ‘One has got to remember that Communism first succeeded in Russia, and must for some time bear a specifically Russian imprint, including the centuriesold tradition of secrecy in government. Even a major revolution cannot wipe out that tradition in a generation.’

Where most of us tend to dip in and out, for Philby politics trumped everything, to the surprise of almost