The official story of Kim Philby’s career begins and ends with Zionism. We’re told that Kim was recruited to the KGB through the beguiling Zionist and Communist Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann). Litzi’s contacts in England were Philby’s first KGB handlers.
Litzi Friedmann/Alice Kohlmann
After Litzi come the Rothschilds. Introductions from Victor Rothschild, who worked with his uncle Lord Rothschild as a sort of tag-team on Zionist issues, put Philby’s recruits inside the ‘charmed circle’ of British intelligence.
Victor’s on the left.
Finally in 1962, complains from Flora Solomon to Victor (the 3rd Lord Rothschild by this time) about Philby’s KGB work in the 1930s sealed his fate. Flora’s complaints were motivated by Philby’s “anti-Israel” writing for the Observer.
Flora Solomon
So, we’re told that Kim’s career sweetened and soured along with his relation to Zionism; the most dramatic moments being punctuated by the Rothschild family. All sides of the ‘Fifth Man’ debate concur on these details.
I believe that this official story flatters Zionist power and uses the ‘Rothschild’ name to distract from other important power-politics. Philby didn’t end up in Beirut by accident; neither was the timing of his defection to the USSR dictated by the whim of a jealous ex-lover. To illustrate my point, I offer a time line placing Kim’s Beirut work and defection into context with the power-politics which were playing out in Middle East.
Events leading up to Kim Philby’s ‘Defection’
1940 From this date onward Khairallah Talfah, Saddam Hussein’s uncle, begins his intermittent care of the three-year old Hussein, due to the following: 1) Saddam’s father’s desertion of the family; 2) Saddam’s mother’s mental illness; and 3) an abusive step-father. (Why is this important? Please see my post The Cult of Intelligence and Sullivanians, or Fourth Wall Cult.)
1941 Khairallah Talfah cooperates with the Nazis in an attempt to free Iraq from British Imperial domination. This puts Talfah at odds with the post-WWII Iraqi regime, which was beholden to the British.
May 25th 1951 Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defect to the USSR, though this was not confirmed in the press until 1956. Kim Philby’s association with the pair forces him to defend his actions publicly, which he does with great skill. It’s unclear what else Philby does between 1951 an 1956.
1953 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s American-smelling radio program ‘Voice of the Arabs’ begins broadcasting. The program promotes Nasser’s ‘Pan-Arabist’ and anti-European-Imperialist ideology. The American-smelling print media nexus in Beirut, Lebanon also promotes Nasser’s politics.
1956 At 18 years old Saddam Hussein is part of an assassination attempt on King Faisal II (an Imperial British puppet-king) and Prime Minister/General Nuri al-Said, who handed Iraq’s oil rights to the British. Both attempts fail.
August 1956 After being forced out of MI5 but avoiding prosecution for this suspected spy-work, Kim Philby is posted to Beirut to serve as a correspondent to The Economist and The Observer. Kim teams up with his father St. John Philby (a regional political insider and confidant of the Saudi royal family) who is also living in the city. Kim’s journalistic work is a cover: Kim Philby gives information to the KGB (Modin, My 5 Cambridge Friends) and MI6, which hired him as a type of consultant.
October 29th-31st 1956 Israel, Great Britain and France invade Egypt in order to take control of the Suez Canal and to remove Nasser from power. The three aggressors are defeated in their primary goals, leaving the USA and USSR free to try and fill the power vacuum left by previous colonial powers.
1957 Saddam Hussein tries to assassinate a Communist supporter of Iraq’s new Prime Minister, Abd al-Karim Qasim. On turning 20, Saddam Hussein joins the Ba’ath Party in Iraq after careful grooming from his uncle Talfah. Note Saddam’s career in wet-work started well before his Ba’athist political career.
February 1st 1958 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser forms an alliance with the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath party to form the United Arab Republic. The other notable branch of the Ba’ath party is in Iraq.
October 7th, 1959 According to Biography.com: “Saddam and other members of the Ba-ath Party attempted to assassinate Iraq’s then-president, Abd al-Karim Qasim, whose resistance to joining the nascent United Arab Republic and alliance with Iraq’s communist party had put him at odds with the Ba’athists.” Biography.com neglects to tell readers that this assassination attempt was supported by the CIA.
When the assassination fails, Hussein leaves for Egypt where Nasser is still in power. Somebody pays for Saddam Hussein to get a law degree while in Egypt.
December 1961 Anatoly Golitsyn, a senior KGB officer, defects to the West.
March 1962 Anatoly Golitsyn starts talking to American counterintelligence about a ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring.
August 1962 Lord Rothschild brings Flora Solomon in to MI5 to accuse Philby of trying to recruit her to the KGB in the 1930s. ‘Cambridge Five’ case reopened. Peter Wright takes Solomon’s statement for MI5.
January 10th 1963 Nicholas Elliot, a good friend of Philby and previous MI6 station head in Beirut returns to Beirut to extract a ‘confession’ from Philby and is authorized to offer Philby immunity from prosecution. Elliot succeeds in getting a confession from Philby, who was suffering from a head wound, but Philby doesn’t try to return to Britain with the immunity offer.
16th January 1963 According to Tom Carver: “Peter Lunn, who had replaced Nicholas Elliott as Beirut station chief, ordered Philby to report to the British Embassy, where it would have been possible to arrest him. Philby pleaded continued problems with his head injury and didn’t go. He later told [his lover] Eleanor that ‘the minute that call came through, I knew the balloon was up.’”
23rd January 1963 Kim Philby defects to the Soviet Union.
8th February 1963 Ramadan Revolution happens in Iraq: Ba’athist revolutionaries assassinate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim with CIA support. Saddam Hussein returns to Iraq from Egypt after the initial stages of the revolution, and things start going right for him. By 1968 Saddam is one of the most powerful men in Iraq and a driving force behind the Ba’ath party.
I think this series of events provokes questions about the ‘Cambridge Five’ narrative; even if only to make one wonder why Philby’s defection isn’t discussed in terms of the turmoil in Iraq, a country which Allen Dulles called “the most dangerous spot in the world” under Communist-affiliated Qasim’s rule, 1958-63. Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA from 1953-1961.
These questions become more pointed with more background information. I’ll start by pointing out that the rudderless Saddam Hussein, an exploited twenty-five year old, was being groomed by somebody in Egypt during 1959-63. Readers will remember that Anita Pallenberg, an 18 year old with a murky past, was being groomed by the CIA through Playboy magazine in Rome at roughly the same time. Where Anita found ‘belonging’ through the twisted world of CIA-sponsored counter-culture, Saddam found belonging in the Ba’ath party and their CIA-supported intrigues. Somehow the CIA identified Saddam as a useful asset– probably through his spooky Uncle Talfah– and the Agency shipped Saddam off to their friends in Egypt when things got too hot for him in Baghdad.
A youthful portrait of Saddam Hussein
CIA involvement with Egyptian president Nasser’s regime is well known, according to ex-Voice of America employee and historian John Buescher:
The Dulles brothers provided military advisors and equipment to the Egyptian army. Through clandestine contacts, both the State Department and the CIA gave Egyptian leaders, especially Nasser, important intelligence training and assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals and in conducting propaganda campaigns.
Nasser was personally close to CIA leadership, the ‘new kids on the block’, according to CIA historian Ricky-Dale Calhoun:
Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles took a particularly favorable view of Nasser, even after it became known that Nasser had agreed to purchase arms from the Soviet Bloc on very attractive barter terms. The CIA station chief in Cairo, Miles Copeland, was on even more cordial terms with Nasser—and he shared Nasser’s distrust of the British.
Egypt became a focal point for American intelligence after the Suez Crisis, which opened the possibility for America to take over ‘patronage’ of the country in place of the British or French. Nasser’s ‘pan-Arabist’ ideology echoes long-standing American anti-imperialist propaganda: a cynical, hypocritical position favored by creeps like Claire Boothe Luce for flattering native governments and cherry-picking assets from crumbling European empires. Boothe Luce’s penchant for anti-imperialism is why the British sent spook-gigolo Roald Dahl to influence her during WWII; her husband’s media empire would later become a cover for the CIA.
Could the “assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals” of which John Buescher writes have included setting up Nasser’s dedicated radio station ‘Voice of the Arabs’? US intelligence had a well-established working relationship with both British and American radio media for propaganda purposes– FDR had been giving ‘fireside chats’ since the early Thirties. I find the name ‘Voice of the Arabs’ strikingly similar to that of US Government propaganda vehicle ‘Voice of America’, an Office of War Information monstrosity that was founded in 1942 and cooperated with the BBC to pummel the rest of the world with Washington D.C.’s point of view. The ‘Voice of America’ is now brought to you by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the same people who manage Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and who fund the Tor Project.
Laura James, from the Economist Intelligence Unit– The Economist like Kim Philby– has this to say about ‘Voice of the Arabs’ and it’s Egyptian intelligence connection:
“The Voice of the Arabs” had been very carefully designed to become a regional phenomenon. Following the establishment of the new Egyptian intelligence service in March 1953, the Interior Minister, Zakaria Mohieddin, and intelligence officer Fathi al-Dib had formulated an Arab nationalist action plan, which included the development of a radio show as well as funding for Arab nationalist writers and students to study in Egypt.
Students like Saddam Hussein, I wonder…
The other prong to Nasser’s propaganda offensive came from Beirut, Kim Philby’s new base. Beirut had been the Middle East’s information hub since American missionaries set up printing presses there in the 1830s. According to historian Lucy Ladikoff:
Eli Smith’s activities in Syria had far reaching results especially after the removal of his American mission’s printing press from Malta to Beirut. This was of great use to the Arabic language. “Though it was not the missionaries themselves who worked to save the language from its decay, still it was their means, such as schools and new educational systems, printing press equipped to issue books in the Arabic language, and their money that were at the service of the great, enlightened and intellectual Arabs of the period.
Besides having control of Beirut’s influential press, the Americans had a stranglehold on the education system. The American University in Beirut, one of the CIA’s favored recruiting hubs, was founded in 1866 by a protestant missionary using British and American money. It goes without saying that missionaries have always been a useful source of information for Western intelligence agencies– especially in hostile regimes like that of the Imperial Chinese. Regular readers will remember that the talkative Bill-Colby-henchman David Obst was *probably* collecting information from missionaries in Taiwan prior to his Stateside espionage.
I think I’ve established that the CIA had a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein’s Egyptian protector between 1959-63 and that Beirut was a spook-hub, a bit like Vienna is today. In light of these facts Kim Philby’s ‘exile’ from London is more understandable: it wasn’t an exile at all, but simply facilitated his next mission. Why was someone with Kim Philby’s baggage sent to operate around the “most dangerous spot in the world”?
Between Kim and his father St. John, there were few people in the world with better intelligence contacts for the Middle Eastern sphere; Beirut offered the best market for the Philbys’ services.
St. John Philby
St. John’s contacts were hard won. He was the last in a line of intrepid British agents who manipulated the fanatical tribes of the Arab Peninsula; in St. John’s case, he’s noted for playing the Sauds against another British ally, Sharif Hussein bin Ali. The Brits’ history of double-dealing and broken promises, particularly in regard to Anglo-French Declaration and the Balfour Declaration, made St. John’s job very difficult.
While St. John is considered a traitor for favoring Standard Oil interests over British ones when the Saudis were negotiating oil concessions in the 1930s, it’s often overlooked that the British made themselves so reviled with their dishonest policies that awarding the rights to their buddies the Americans was probably the best outcome that London could hope for. (Standard Oil executives had close ties to the OSS and CIA, so St. John’s choice paid Churchill great dividends later.)
St. John is also considered an enemy of Israel, even though his plan for the settlement of Israel, which respected native Arabs’ political rights, was the Jewish State’s only reasonable shot at long-term viability, as even actors like Henry Kissinger now recognize.
In short, between Kim Philby’s MI6/KGB/CIA contacts and St. John Philby’s Arab ties there was little the pair didn’t know about American hopes in the Middle East and how these hopes could be manipulated or even dashed. Bear this in mind when considering Saddam Hussein’s myriad of failed assassination attempts against different targets prior to Kim Philby’s expulsion from the Middle East.
I chose the word ‘expulsion’ very carefully, because I believe it’s a better description of what happened in January 1963 than ‘defection’. MI6 did not consider Philby a dangerous KGB agent otherwise they wouldn’t have continued to use him and he certainly wouldn’t have been posted to Beirut just as the Suez was heating up. The British position is supported by the fact that the KGB harbored doubts about Philby’s loyalty (See My 5 Cambridge Friends)– doubts that didn’t go away after his defection.
What’s far more likely to have happened in 1963 was that Kim Philby became too much of a liability as British Intelligence became more dependent on the Frankenstein they created over in Langley. British double-dealing with the KGB at the expense of American interests in the Middle East became costly. The best and safest way to contain Kim was behind the Iron Curtain; part of the price Churchill’s intelligence services paid for their ‘desperate deception’ was 50 years of control (and counting!) in the Arab Peninsula.
I do not mean to imply that Rothschild or Zionist interests play no role in the ‘Cambridge Five’ nor that they are unconnected with KGB spying. I’m saying that they don’t deserve the preeminent position in the Philby narrative. I suspect that Litzi was useful for establishing Philby’s communist credentials, and that Flora was just a useful idiot. Victor Rothschild was one agent in a shameful tradition of privileged intrigue, which I discuss in Is the Devil a German? and to which ends the lives of Kim Philby, Saddam Hussein and millions of regular people are just collateral damage.
Readers may also be interested in my posts on Abaddon, A Death in Finland and Jihad Al What?
