If Britain's most famous double agent had given himself up, what would have happened?
In 1977, some 14 years after he fled to Moscow, double agent Kim Philby gave a lecture to KGB officers at The Centre, Soviet intelligence headquarters. The lecture, delivered in English, ranged widely over Philby’s long and astonishing career as a communist mole within MI6, but its thrust was a piece of heartfelt advice on a specific aspect of spycraft: the dangers of making a confession.
What, Philby asked rhetorically, should a spy do if he is interrogated by an enemy intelligence service? Should he reveal all? Should he clam up? Should he seek to confuse his interrogators by laying a false trail?
Philby was emphatic: “Any confession involves giving information to the enemy. It is therefore—by definition—wrong.”
He knew what he was talking about. From 1951, when he first came under suspicion, until 1956, when he was officially exonerated by Harold Macmillan, Philby was repeatedly interrogated by MI5 in an effort to force him to confess. The security service even brought in William “Jim” Skardon, a fabled practitioner in the art of interrogation, who conducted almost a dozen separate interviews with the suspected spy.
Philby did not crack. He batted back every accusation, denied every shred of circumstantial evidence, and stuck to his claim that he was a loyal servant of the crown being unfairly hounded by McCarthyite witch-hunters. Eventually, Philby’s pursuers gave up the chase.
But what if he had confessed? How would his story, and our world, be different, if Philby had decided, instead of denying everything, to spill the beans?
Some of the bloodshed he caused might have been prevented. Many of the operations he leaked to the Soviets were already compromised beyond repair, but others were still in play—a full confession would have enabled both MI6 and the CIA to carry out damage limitation.
Philby’s confession would have meant identifying his fellow Soviet spies, including Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross; it would have revealed the full extent of Soviet penetration into western governments and establishments; it would have exposed Soviet recruitment methods, spy-craft and personnel; it would have stopped, before it started, the public hue and cry for the Third Man, the Fourth Man, the Fifth Man, and so on...
A confession would have put the Anglo-American intelligence relationship back on an even keel, placated FBI chief J Edgar Hoover and given Soviet intelligence a bloody nose. It would have saved the Macmillan government, already rocked by scandal, the acute embarrassment that ensued when he defected.
But if Philby had confessed, we would almost certainly never have heard of him. The entire mess would have been swept under the carpets of Whitehall; Philby would not have been prosecuted, but shuffled off into obscurity, and told to keep his mouth shut. The defections of Burgess and Maclean would have been dismissed as aberrations. With Philby’s confession in hand, MI6 would have gone back to business as usual, congratulating itself on having weeded out a wrong’un, a rogue traitor.
Instead, by holding out and refusing to confess, Philby opened up a gulf between MI5 and MI6, and ensured that when the truth did finally emerge a decade later, the effect was doubly calamitous, prompting a mole-hunt within the secret service, a crisis of confidence within British intelligence, and deep chill in relations between London and Washington.
But for all his pontificating to the KGB about the importance of resisting interrogation, Philby did confess. In January 1963, he was confronted in Beirut by his old friend and MI6 colleague, Nicholas Elliott. After a long, brutal duel, Philby produced a written confession, a mixture of truth, lies and half-truths. He said he had stopped spying for the Soviets in the 1940s, which was a lie. But he admitted enough of the truth to ensure that if he ever set foot in Britain again, he would face the full weight of prosecution.
Then he vanished.
Philby never admitted to the KGB that he had told Elliott anything. But they had their suspicions. That, and the ease with which he managed to get away from Beirut, probably explains why he was never made a hero of the Soviet Union, and treated with considerable distrust through his 25-year exile in Moscow.
When he stood up in KGB headquarters and proclaimed that every agent should follow his example and never confess, he was telling another in a long life of lies—and at least some members of his audience knew it.
