Perfidious old boy

A spy among friends: kim philby by Ben Macintyre; Bloomsbury; Price: Rs.399; Pages 352

THE SECOND WORLD WAR and the Cold War which followed were the great eras of spies and secret agents glorified by Ian Fleming’s James Bond and John le Carre’s Smiley. A Spy Among Friends details the cloak and dagger activities of three of the best known spies of World War II and the Cold War period: the American James Jesus Angleton, and Britons Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby.

The central character of this fascinating book is Philby, the cleverest and most enigmatic of the three. Unknown to the other two, he was a double-agent employed by MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, but also working for the Soviet Union’s NKVD secret service. He was a close friend of Angleton (working for the US Central Intelligence Agency) and Elliott (also with MI6), both of whom were completely in the dark about his duplicity.

Philby’s clandestine reports to his Soviet handlers sabotaged over 30 major covert operations conducted by the Americans and the British in Germany during WWII, and later in the captive Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, resulting in the exposure and execution of thousands of operatives, guerrillas, and their families. Though their blood was on Philby’s hands, he seems to have had no remorse whatever because he felt he was working for the nobler cause of the global triumph of communism.

To a significant extent, the secret of Philby’s success as a master spy and double agent was his upper class background and admission into Cambridge University as an undergraduate student. “Throughout the 1930s, Cambridge boiled with ideological conflict,” writes Macintyre. “Hitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish Civil War would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme right and extreme left would fight it out in university rooms and in the streets.”

Driven by Soviet propaganda and ideological fervour kindled by the fellow-travelling Fabian Socialists of Bloomsbury, the Cambridge spies included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess (both of whom later defected to the Soviet Union, with Philby helping in Maclean’s defection), Anthony Blunt (an art curator, who later disengaged himself from the Soviet Union and was never prosecuted), and Allan Nunn May, a nuclear scientist. And unlike most spies, particularly double agents who become turncoats for financial reward, the Cambridge spies did it for the ideological triumph of communism. Nicholas Elliott, however, was not ideologically motivated — he was simply looking for a job after graduation. His father, Sir Claude Elliott (OBE), was headmaster of Britain’s grandest public school, Eton, and knew everybody who mattered in the British establishment. Thus his induction into MI6 was a cakewalk.

At the ascot races, Nicholas met Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty’s Government, who had close links to MI6. Over drinks, Nicholas told “Van” that he would like to join the intelligence service. “Sir Robert Vansittart smiled and replied: ‘I am relieved you  have asked me for something so easy.’” The Old Boy recruitment network had worked perfectly.

Indeed, it was the Old Boy network which protected Philby for over 30 years in MI6, particularly after he developed a close friendship with Elliot. (Angleton, a complete Anglophile, joined them later). Even when Philby was under deep suspicion, Elliott and Angleton came to his rescue and got him off the hook. More intelligent but less well-connected MI6 officers who were not taken in by Philby’s upper class charm, were ignored.

There was a period in the early 1950s after Philby had been ill-advisedly cleared of suspicion by British intelligence when he distanced himself from the NKVD. He could then have safely lived in the UK but chose to get a job as a journalist in Beirut. Despite his suspicious track record, MI6 re-recruited him. “Kim Philby’s return to British intelligence displayed the Old Boy network running at its smoothest: a word in an ear, a nod, a drink with one of the chaps at the club, and the machinery kicked in,” writes Macintyre.

Perhaps accustomed to flirting with danger, in Beirut Philby renewed his Soviet contacts which proved to be his undoing. Soon after, he was fully exposed back home in the UK as a Soviet spy by a defector. Amazingly, Elliot was despatched by MI6 to extract a (partial) confession from Philby. But instead of arresting him for treason, Elliott left a door open for Philby’s escape to the Soviet Union. Philby gladly entered that door and spent the rest of his life in Russia, feted and honoured by his Soviet handlers. He also married a Polish Russian, 20 years younger, his fourth wife.

But by all accounts, Philby was less than enamoured with the egalitarian paradise that was the Soviet Union and maintained a very British persona, which is perhaps why the Soviets remained innately suspicious of him. “In Britain, Philby had been too British to be doubted; in Russia, he was too British to be believed,” writes Macintyre.

How did Philby fool everybody — and in particular MI6 — for over three decades working as a Soviet spy while occupying a senior position in British intelligence? Part of the answer is in the author’s comment on Donald Maclean: “(He) was the son of a former cabinet minister, a product of a public school and Cambridge, a member of the Reform Club. And so he was protected from suspicion, in Philby’s words, by the ‘genuine mental block which stubbornly resisted the belief that respected members of the establishment could do such things (spy for the Soviet Union)’”, explains Macintyre. In other words, it was somehow unthinkable even in MI6 that a public school and Oxbridge educated upper class person could betray his family, friends and country. 

There’s an Indian angle to Philby, not included in the book. Philby was born in Ambala, Punjab and had befriended a Goa-born girl Yvonne, who married the distinguished and prize-winning Australian journalist, Phillip Knightley. When Philby knew he was dying, he expressed the wish to bare his soul to Knightley who flew to Moscow and scooped the world with that interview. 

Rahul Singh

Sam Bahadur story

Field marshal sam manekshaw: The man and his times by Behram M.& Zenobia Panthaki niyogi books; Price: Rs.1,495; Pages 214

THIS SPLENDIDLY PRODUCED book brought out on art paper and profusely illustrated with photographs and facsimiles of letters to and from India’s sole Field Marshal, Sam Manekshaw, to various dignitaries is well-calculated to evoke both remembrance and nostalgia about a colourful personality and the stirring times in which he lived. But this is not just another coffee table book. It has serious content.  

As with other biographers, the authors have devoted their initial chapters to their subject’s early life with the family — he was born in April 1914 in Amritsar, the fifth of six children — before he entered the Army. Several subsequent chapters in the book trace Manekshaw’s career as he climbed the several rungs up the service ladder before he became the chief of army staff in 1969.

Two chapters are devoted to the India-Pakistan War of 1971 that led to Pakistan’s comprehensive defeat and the emergence of Bangladesh, aptly termed India’s finest hour. The authors go into some detail about Manekshaw’s differences with Indira Gandhi on the critical question of when to launch hostilities against Pakistan for its “demographic aggression” by pushing hundreds of thousands of refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan into India. Mrs. Gandhi wanted operations to be started immediately.

But Manekshaw refused to be bulldozed into precipitate action that was bound to end in disaster as the Indian Armed Forces were wholly unprepared materially, and also psychologically, to fight a war. Indira Gandhi reluctantly agreed with Manekshaw, but did not quite forget his open opposition to her wishes in a full cabinet meeting.  

The book also goes into the unfortunate controversy about who conceived the ambitious war plan to capture the ‘Dacca bowl’ and liberate the whole of East Bengal from West Pakistani rule. In truth, the initial plan was only to carve out some territory in East Bengal to install a Bangladesh-government-in-exile (then located in Calcutta). The easy success of the Indian Army in bypassing Pakistani positions strewn along the border, the demoralisation of the Pakistani forces isolated in the eastern wing, and the wholehearted support of the local population encouraged military planners in New Delhi to go for the jugular by capturing Dacca. The rest, as they say, is history, leading to the surrender of over 90,000 prisoners of war, and the liberation of over 60 million people.  

A unique quality of this book is that it treats its subject, the Field Marshal, with affection, but without deference; hence he is presented without concealing his weaknesses and foibles. He was generous to a fault and large-hearted; the authors also extol their subject’s capacity to forgive and forget. These attributes were also visible in his dealings with soldiers of the Pakistan Army who became prisoners-of-war in 1971. Manekshaw believed that they should be treated with consideration, so that they would return to Pakistan as ambassadors of goodwill.

In point of fact, the POWs were cashiered on their repatriation to Pakistan as they could no longer be trusted. Manekshaw was strict with himself in availing official privileges and perquisites, and could excuse incompetence but not dishonesty.

Manekshaw’s sense of humour was something else again. It was unconventional to the extreme. And quirky, which often led Manekshaw to land himself in trouble and get misunderstood by persons in authority. For instance, shortly after the 1971 operations he informed media persons that he (Manekshaw) had the choice in 1947 of joining the Pakistan army and, had he done so, the results of the 1971 war might have been different. That raised a furore, which took quite some time to die down.

So did another incident when he was taking the salute as the chief guest at a function for girl NCC cadets. He chose to kiss one of the prize winners on the stage, which led to another furore. An enquiry was ordered by the ministry of defence, but was proceeded with at snail’s pace until the case evaporated from public memory. Manekshaw’s explanation was that he saw nothing wrong in one soldier greeting another in this affectionate manner. Perhaps Indira Gandhi did not quite approve of these amiable eccentricities. Even his evenings spent in the Oberoi bar during the 1971 conflict weren’t quite approved as displaying flamboyance, but also a certain lack of gravitas.

The book does not pull its punches since it frankly addresses the controversies that dogged the Field Marshal’s career, and also dwells on the indignities suffered by him in his declining years. Arrears of his revised pay and allowances after becoming Field Marshal in 1983 only reached him in 2008 when he was very ill. The authors, husband and wife, knew their subject in a personal way since Panthaki had served as Manekshaw’s aide-de-camp. They continued their relationship well after the Field Marshal’s retirement to Wellington in the Nilgiris, and his fading days. Written in a simple style and replete with anecdotes, the book is an index to stirring times while being an easy read.

Several years back I had concluded a tribute to Sam Manekshaw with the words, “… memories fade and those retailing them will also fade away. What a historical personage like Manekshaw deserves, in truth, is an impartial biography, not a hagiography, for crafting India’s finest hour. With competent military historians available that should not be a problem…” This book fills that void.

P.S. CHARI (The Book Review, September 2014)