Supermole

By John Elson

THE MASTER SPY

by Phillip Knightley

Knopf; 292 pages; $19.95

In the extensive postwar literature of espionage and double agentry, fact and fiction tend to blur. Was Magnus Pym the name of John le Carre's perfect spy? Or was it Guy Burgess? Pym and Burgess, Donald Maclean and Toby Esterhase -- characters from the shadow world of MI6 and the KGB -- seem equally real, equally fanciful.

And so it was with Harold Adrian Russell ("Kim") Philby, whose exploits as a Soviet mole inside Britain's Secret Intelligence Service seem breathtaking enough to have been crafted by a master of the thriller genre. The son of an eccentric Arabist, Philby entered Communism's orbit while at Cambridge in the 1930s. Carefully disguising those links, he joined Britain's SIS and rose high enough in its ranks to rate consideration as its potential chief. Yet by the time he disappeared in 1963, only to surface in the Soviet Union a few months later, it was painfully clear that Philby all along had been not only a Soviet agent but also, as Knightley calls him, "the most remarkable spy in the history of espionage."

Only experts can guess at how many secrets of the Western allies Philby passed along to his Moscow controls, or how many British agents were sent to certain death on missions whose cover Philby had exposed. When he died last May at 76, he was honored as a hero of the Soviet Union.

Philby's is a story oft told -- once, self-servingly, by himself (My Silent War, 1968). It seems likely that Knightley's will stand as the definitive account, despite its pedestrian style: Knightley, a former special correspondent for London's Sunday Times, was the only Western journalist to interview Philby at length during his last years of semiretirement in Moscow.

Oddly, Philby's comments on world politics and on his colorful past seem wan and trite. It is almost as if this supermole wanted to demystify his own legend, making double agentry seem as banal as bartending. The impression of ordinariness is reinforced by his chatty letters to Knightley, which are cited in extenso. Philby comes across as a slightly dotty old Brit, complaining about how hard it is to find "bilambees" (an Indian vegetable) in Moscow and fuming about the "preposterous" radio commentaries of "the BBC's own Smarty Cooke, Alistair of that ilk."

The Soviets amply rewarded Philby for his services: a lavish apartment (by Moscow standards), chauffeurs, a plummy desk job at KGB headquarters. Yet the only perk he really cared for, Knightley notes, was access to artifacts of his homeland: pipes from Jermyn Street, books (he liked Dick Francis' mysteries), magazines, the Times of London (whose daily crossword puzzle he regularly solved in 15 minutes).

Why does the Philby name retain its hold on the popular imagination when other Soviet spies have been forgotten? One explanation is that despite the fogyism of his final years, Philby was blessed with dash and elan; he was a witty boon companion, irresistible to many women. Another, Knightley suggests with grudging admiration, is that he was a perverted idealist who betrayed Britain for a cause, not cash. Finally, of course, there is the question of class. Philby had neither title nor inherited fortune, but he was distinctly "one of us," as Mrs. Thatcher might say. That someone condemned to success by breeding and bearing would chuck it all for a utopian delusion is always a mystery, sometimes a great madness.