Philby: glossing over the implications

GU LIKE THE proverbial dog returning to its vomit, the British ruling class cannot avoid returning to the question of Kim Philby, the Soviet spy who became head of anti-Soviet espionage in The implications of Kim Philby's story and of the revelations that were made about the operations of British and US intelligence agencies at the time of his defection to the USSR in 1963 are too disastrous to be simply forgotten, so they have to be distorted.

Thus distortedly but unmistakably the traits of capitalist society in an advanced state of decay find themselves reflected in the mass media that the capitalists themselves control.

Philby, the son of an upper middle-class family with a tradition of mild revolt and pronounced eccentricity, was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the time of the great depression that followed the 1929 Wall St crash.

The middle class was thrown into turmoil by these events, and in many instances turned towards a socialist solution to the deep crisis in the capitalist Explains This documentary explains that Philby left university in 1933, the year of Hitler's accession to power in Germany, and that the experience that determined him to struggle consistently for what he considered to be Communism was the brutal massacre of the Austrian workers' movement by Dollfuss in 1934.

He was at that point enrolled by Soviet intelligence as an agent EWER Philby:

Glossing over the John PHILBY of the war, even earning a deal of respect from the US he came into contact with.

Phliby: Ruthless Journey:

BBC 2 Documentary Wi ednesday July 29 includes filn I shot by Philby's son John, also relates childhood recollections of his father.

Albania to topple Communist state.

To this end Philby was set to work recruiting emigré Albanian royalists to train as guerrilla fighters who would then be parachuted into the country to start an uprising. This scheme had the blessing of the then Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.

Indeed, by 1949 it appears that the CIA had also become interested in the Albanian venture.

The combined operation was now on a much larger scale, and joint command of it was placed in the hands of-Kim Philby.

The allied governments watched with dismay as their guerrilla squads were picked up one by one as they tried to enter the country.

In the final big drop the whole group of infiltrators was surrounded as it parachuted down and massacred to the last man.

Philby's cover was effectively blown in the early 1950s by the efforts of the FBI to identify a source of leaks from the British embassy in Washington.

They successfully tracked down the source, who was McLean, Philby's fellow agent.

Kim PHILBY and to undertake the murderous adventure in Albania; the interconnectedness of all the organs of class rule, of the secret services with the politicians, whether Conservative like Bevin, Labour; the role of the media of communication. under capitalism, in this case "The Times' which was shown by the Philby case to be a regular recruiting ground for SIS in the pre-war period at least.

But the BBC too plays its part in this.

It is part of the capitalist state. It must therefore try to gloss over the things that really emerge from the Philby story and direct our attention instead to some metaphysical maunderings from Hugh Trevor Roper concerning the personal and emotional poverty of the individual spy's existence.

The saddest thing about Philby for Trevor Roper was. not that, against his foil, we see the real dirty mess that the British ruling any genuine human contact PAGE THREE talist state is indeed a sad one, and in the footage of him that his son has managed to bring recently out of the Soviet Union we see a sad and tired man.

After all, he broke free, as he saw it, from the limitations of his own upper middle-class background into the service of Communism only to find himself a hireling of Stalinism.

Generation

This was, after all, the fate of a whole generation of intellectuals who made the first faltering radicalism only to find in Stalins away from middle-class ism, whether they took it or left it, something that reinforced all their worst weaknesses and formed a barrier to further progress.

Not only Philby, but also Steinbeck and Brecht belonged to this generation. It is now mostly dead, or crushed and defeated. moribund, although still vicious Th Transitiona Programme For thie Foun