The Kindly Superspy

MY SILENT WAR by Kim Philby. 262 pages. Grove. $5.95.

THE PHILBY CONSPIRACY by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knighfley. 300 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

THE THIRD MAN by E. H. Cookridge. 281 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

KIM PHILBY: THE SPY I MARRIED by Eleanor Philby. 174 pages. 8allanfine. 750.

Each working day in Moscow, a chunky, blue-eyed Englishman arrives at the KGB headquarters at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square to pursue his duties as "chief adviser" in Russian espionage against Britain, the Commonwealth and the U.S. He is well equipped for the job. As the most successful double agent of modern times, Kim Philby O.B.E., scion of the British Establishment, Cambridge University, would very likely now be the head of the British Secret Service had he not been discovered and forced to flee to Russia in 1963.

Five years later, the massive scar tissue left on British intelligence has begun to heal, and diligent reporters are prying out coherent accounts of Philby's 34 years as a Soviet agent. Even now the full truth is not known, as illustrated by the fact that these four books show discrepancies at critical points. For example, how did Philby, as the net closed around him, escape from Beirut to asylum in Russia? The authors of Conspiracy, a team of reporters from the London Sunday Times, suggest that he made it to the Syrian border in a Turkish truck; then he went to Turkey and walked across the border into Soviet Armenia. In The Spy I Married, his American third wife, Eleanor, who later joined him for a time in Moscow until he threw her over for the wife of his fellow defector, Donald Maclean, has a different version: she says he told her that "he walked a good deal of the way." E. H. Cookridge, Philby's onetime colleague in the British Secret Service, who is now a multivolume espionage historian, provides an account that rings with spooky authenticity in some details. He says flatly that Philby sailed from Beirut harbor on the Polish ship Dalmatova. Philby himself, in his smug, annoyingly charming autobiography, refuses to say, since his Soviet friends might want to use the route again.

Despite such divergencies, the four books form a fascinating mosaic of the contradictory character of the master spy, a man ruthlessly cold and dedicated to Communism professionally, but by all accounts a warm and likable man in his personal life. Philby dispatched hundreds of Albanian patriots to their deaths, in theory landing them in Albania to stir up resistance, but in fact sending them straight into the guns of the Albanian Communist troops, whom he had tipped off. But he worried over some innocent emigrants mistakenly interned as German agents during World War II. He also wept when his pet fox was pushed off the balcony by his maid in Beirut and killed. With every reason to hate him, Eleanor Philby can write: "Our marriage was perfect in every way. He was the most lovely and devoted husband and a marvellous father."

Philby had certain unlikely assets as a spy. He stammered badly, which won him instant sympathy and enabled him. in tight situations, to gather his thoughts before speaking. He drank to the brink of alcoholism but never became indiscreet, a facility that spared him suspicion for a long time. Reasoned his associates: "Surely so reckless a drinker could not be hiding a great secret." Serving a far-off master, he seemed the sanest, least ambitious man in the highly competitive corridors of Britain's espionage establishment.

The Games of Intrigue. Now that Philby is "home" in Russia, as he puts it, the other side of that cool, professional cloak seems to have been exposed. As Eleanor Philby says, "I noticed that he sometimes seemed pathetically pleased by the approbation of the Russians. Every pat on the back was like a medal or a bouquet of flowers. Kim's excitement at any word of praise seemed disproportionate." Indeed, Conspiracy convincingly argues that Philby, recruited to Communism in his youth at Cambridge during the Depression, never really grew up. He played the games of intrigue, the hide-and-seek of duplicity, while remaining in essence politically naive.

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