Philby: The Long Road to Moscow.

by Patrick Scale and Maureen McConville

Penguin Books, 1978 NZ Price: $3.20

Kim Philby is usually seen as the Judas of the twentieth century. A superspy, the man who betrayed Britain's secrets, to the Soviet enemy, for twenty years. As such the Philby phenomenon has not ceased to titillate. The subject of the gentleman traitor betraying the establishment of which he is an integral part continues to fascinate. It has inspired books, a play, a television drama, a feature film and numerous investigations in the British press. And in the media Philby's life is invariably portrayed as a particularly wretched example of despicable treachery.

But as the authors note in their foreword "much is wrong with this caricature". They claim that their task in retelling, yet again, the Philby story is "in demythologizing the superspy", in showing "that he was essentially an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation".

They have succeeded admirably in fulfilling this task. Philby emerges as more of a bureaucrat than the villainous double agent of popular myth. Although initially it appears it was an ideological commitment to Marxism that attracted him to the Soviet cause, as an agent of the Russian secret service he was unable to "back-track" as so many other left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s did, following the shocking disclosures about Stalinist communism. Philby's treachery was also motivated by the attraction of belonging to an elite machine, the Russian intelligence service. Once invited to join how could he turn back?

At heart Philby was a man of the mid-twentieth century; an ideological and organisational man. He fought his cold war in both the world of ideas and the land of the filing cabinet.

Robin C. Craw