Kim Philby, Lecturing in East Berlin, Bragged of How Easy It Was to Fool MI6 | Hacker News Reader

Kim Philby, Lecturing in East Berlin, Bragged of How Easy It Was to Fool MI6

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Before you take Philby's comments at face value, a few things to note:

1) Philby gave this speech under the auspices of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state where communication was heavily controlled and censored, with art required to be politically acceptable, with neighbors spying on each other and family members reporting disloyal statements to secret police, and with copy and fax machines requiring licenses (IIRC); where saying the wrong thing could get you killed, imprisoned in a mental hospital or sent to Siberia; and where propaganda was omnipresent. He said no more than what was allowed and likely, I think, what he was told to say.

2) In the recording the audio doesn't match the video. The BBC attributes that to equipment issues; but maybe his speech was edited or dubbed. The Soviets seemed to do things like that regularly; for example, leaders who later became unpopular with the regime were reputedly removed from historical photos with an 'airbrush' (this was before digital imagery) and from all other historical records.

3) At least one aspect of his speech sounds clearly like Soviet propaganda: He attributes a large part of his success to being in the 'governing class' in England; that is, Philby is blaming UK's the class system for their intelligence incompetence. A foundation of Soviet ideology was that they were a classless system, superior to the West where the masses were oppressed by the elite. It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence.

>It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence.

Why do you need handlers or propagandists to attribute this to? Couldn't this simply be what he believed? He was an ideologically motivated spy after all.

Do you think it's implausible his position in the UK class system got him in, and protected him?

Personally I think it more likely that Brits just don't like to be reminded of the fact that their society was built on a class system, and its not going away any time soon. It doesn't matter if the Soviets say it or not: Brits don't like to be reminded that their empire requires rather a lot of serfs in order to even get itself out of bed in the morning ..

These days of course you would be confronted with a lot more that would make it hard to simply deny things:

(a) Absolute records of your physical movements. (Cellphone, car)

(b) Absolute records of your communications and social network. (Cellphone, email/social networks)

(c) Video evidence of activity in almost any semi-formal place of work, carpark, ATM, shop, or similar. (Physical surveillance ubiquity)

(d) Probable audio recording of your conversations via hacked cellphone.

In theory, you can watch anybody, but for this to work, you'd need someone to actually look at the evidence i.e. suspect the person in the first place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes... And in this case it's the guardians of the guardians: who are you going to trust with watching the head of MI6's counter-intelligence division 24/7?

As the CIA found in its paranoid early days, over-suspicion is highly counter-productive (see e.g. [1]). You just HAVE to trust your managers. Even if all services have some kind of internal intelligence setup to watch the watchers, it's focused downwards where the risks are higher and cost of suspicion lower, and it has to be run by people you trust the most. You balance the cost of a mole, versus the opportunity cost of turning down genuine defectors and trusting your own staff.

This is why (according to [2]) many European services are run by people from wealthy, old families, preferably with at least a few members who have served. It's expected that on average, these people have profound ties to their country - if nothing else, in the form of immense property portfolios - and thus are much less likely to defect. You can't bribe them, you can't offer them a better life [3], what's left? Ideology, and that can be somewhat watched for. Of course, you deny yourself some great talent that way but as with managing a hedge fund, you want to limit downside rather than maximize upside. Nationalism and dynastic politics are a form of defense against foreign enemies.

Hence Philby. He was trusted by design, not because MI6 were "bloody incestuous fools" or whatever, and no amount of surveillance would have changed that.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside-Showdown/dp/0345...

[2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-...

[3] Kalugin recalls in http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence-Espiona... that he was somewhat worried about Philby's living conditions in the Soviet Union (unheated flat, alcoholism, etc.). It's been a while since I read the book but I recall he or someone else decided to push for him to have a good quality of life as an advertisement to other potential defectors; only then was Philby put up in proper accommodation and welcomed by the Soviet system.

Philby wasn't trusted from 1951 onwards, he was sacked from SIS and caught in lies by interrogators - using things like his wife's passport stamps to capture his movements.

Technology these days may enable mass surveillance but historically the same thing happened - because there was much less international traffic. MI5 could "burgle their way across London", open all the international mail it wanted to, read the telegrams sent abroad etc.

The sheer change in volume of international travel and communication is recent.

Per capita this wave of globalization is about the same as the last one, 1860-1914.

> you'd need someone to actually look at the evidence

Not necessarily somebody. It can be something.

Not enough signal to train your classifier. At best you can reduce the effort by removing dead time aka when someone is asleep.

(a) and (b) and (d) you can certainly control if you're not in an area with ubiquitous license plate readers. Anybody who isn't a rank amateur is going to assume his communications are or will be scrutinized. Hell, even the "good guys" who handle classified information are taught to assume public communications channels are compromised.

(c) you might have a harder time coping with, but people have to suspect you before they'll try to piece together those kinds of records. And even then... Robert Hanson got away with it for decades using dead drops in public places. You need a whole lot of information before you can tell the difference between a day at the beach and a day at the beach where a potential spy passed classified information to someone.

I would bet my last dollar the vast majority of spies are compromised by enemy agents in their own intelligence network. No matter how good you are, if your boss is working for the enemy you're going to get caught. Indeed, Philby himself was outed by a KGB agent who defected to the West.

Don't carry a cellphone.

... and only cycle at night, wearing a full face mask. It's tricky to get around without being caught on CCTV somewhere.

Of course, being the person who cycles at night while wearing a face mask is a strong personally identifying attribute.

"Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know much about the world."

Adam Curtis hilariously documents the 20th centuries near 100% failure rate of the British Secret Services (except when they manufactured a plot).

And how they were created to hunt fictional spies dreamed up by paranoid tabloid readers obsessed with novels about German spies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...

I don't know about the British intelligence services, but at least in the CIA its very incestious, they recruit people who fit a certain mold, then recruit their children and their grandchildren.

That they have a distorted world view is not surprising (not unlike SV, but without the sobering reality of markets and competition).

40 years after the OSS was superseded by the CIA, the CIA was still actively recruiting the grandkids of OSS employees. They like to keep everything in the family.

CIA case officer Robert Baer's talk about this is pretty entertaining - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhpdFu4BpA

These days if you work in the world domination industry you are more likely working for Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg.

Bob Baer's books are rather good - particularly See No Evil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_%28Baer_book%29

Quite interesting to compare Baer's experiences at the CIA with high profile members of MI6, particularly Paddy Ashdown - the latter being very careful not to say what he actually did on the espionage side while at MI6 although he does mention his "day job".

It's more frightening to realise that there is no conspiracy running the world, pulling to strings, and realise that everyone is not very good at their jobs and dont know much about the world.

A conspiracy is comforting, the reality of ignorance and incompetence is much more scary

"When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth." (Steve Jobs)

An always appropriate quote by Alan Moore regarding conspiracy theory:

    “The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that 
    conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is 
    more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually 
    chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish 
    Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more 
    frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

Certainly, conspiracies exist, but the tendency to believe conspiracies to be all powerful and omnipresent is essentially a religious belief, a kind of occult thinking. Better to believe the world is being run competently by sinister forces than incompetently by sociopathic bureaucrats.

You say that, but just a few days ago the Panama Papers were released. I don't buy into the worldwide conspiracy thing, but there's clearly stuff going on that others don't want you to know about.

Other than a list of names, what did the Panama Papers tell the world that it didn't already know? That the rich use offshore accounts and shell companies to hide their money from the government wasn't exactly a secret to anyone. For that matter, not everything revealed in the Panama Papers is necessarily illegal.

Given the world's reaction to this news[1], I'd say it actually is news and not stuff that was known, but maybe only suspected.

The best response is for the common man should stop paying taxes as well. If that happens, you'll get across the board tax reform immediately.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/iceland-prime-m...

As yet, this isn't the world's reaction, merely Iceland's. From what I can tell, most of the outrage seems to be from governments wanting to know where their tax money is - popular outrage seems to be minimal.

Although to be fair, the momentum would probably take more time to build in larger countries with more diverse and complex societies.

"The Panama leak is shocking not for the illegal acts; but the extent of what they have made legal." - Greenwald

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/04/a-key-similarity-between...

Yes they're hardly competent to manage conspiricies. Just tawdry little deals deriving from this bizarre culture that believes its enemy is oversight & the citizenry.

A strong, responsible citizenry won't quake in fear and protects itself.

In Switzerland where rifle training is commonplace & one in every other house's larder. Bank robbers don't get far there, the citizens camly and responsible detain or kill them long before their efficient police even get there.

Sadly in Europe & the US the Executive fears and seeks to weaken, terrify & disarm their electorates.

Conspiracies do to politics what religions do to life: provide a framework explaining the inexplicable, in order to confort and indicate paths for meaningful action.

There is a book that paints the same picture of the CIA called A Legacy of Ashes.

And Le Carre's interesting The Looking Glass War - apparently intended as an antidote to his The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which he felt in retrospect had impressed people a bit too much about the British intelligence service's competence.

Similar track record to 21st century USA FBI

well, for anyone who read le carré philby here confirms one of the key failings of british intelligence services - the utter disbelief that anyone from their top-universities/upper echelons could ever be a communist.

tinker tailor soldier spy is basically all about that. they hired students who had openly joined leftist groups and never really followed up on that.

and Le Carré has said that he sexed even that up from his experience working as a spy.

He wasn't communist, and that nonsense worldview is why they missed the problem. He was an opportunist, like many people in all governments. He sold info to russians while others just sold contracts to friends or embezzled directly. It's not us vs a foreign them, there are selfish and power-hungry monsters throughout all sides.

He was not an opportunist, he was vindictive; when he did not get certain things or recognition, he sought out the Russian government's approval.

Strange how the author slips "said Mr. Philby, whose treachery was responsible for the deaths of hundreds" casually into the final paragraph.

The article generally appears to be written with the assumption that the readers already are quite aware of the doings of the Cambridge Five - a reasonable assumption for people over a certain age, but probably less and less likely.

Commies kill people because they're scum. When we kill people it's because we're trying to set the world right. /s

I read this book a few months back, and was amazed to how easy it was get to the top secret information. Good information as it was easy to read and to understand.

http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby-Betrayal/dp/0...

All of Ben's books are amazing. Check Agent ZigZag out. I've read it like 4 times. Such an amazing fun story. http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story-Espionage-Betrayal-...

Zig Zag was good, but if just starting with Ben Macintyre, I'd start with the Philby book. It's the better of the two. I've read both.

Thanks for the recommendation. Just bought it. At first I though it was fiction, but it is a true story.

His autobiography ("My Silent War") is worth reading - the process for getting into the intelligence services seemed pretty cursory - seemed to be pretty much lunch at a club to make sure he seemed like a decent chap...

Whilst we are compiling a bibliography, I'll add another suggestion: the excellent fictionalization of the Cambridge spies by John Banville, The Untouchable

Yeah, it's easy, just be a wellborn member of British aristocracy.

I decided to look that up...

The result is curious indeed. It appears that Kim Philby's father, St John Philby, was a senior civil servant, but not an aristocrat. He was what was called in those days an "Arabist" and had converted to Islam.

He does seem, however, to have passed onto his son a love of intrigue...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Philby

But St John Philby also betrayed Britain.

His official role was to protect British interests with the House of Saud, being Ibn Sauds right hand man. Instead he was also on the payroll of Standard Oil, and sold out to the Americans. This alone should have been a warning to the establishment

Kim Philby was also mixed race - his mother was Indian. In British society at the time that very much didn't make him part of the Establishment, and he did face prejudice from senior officials because of it.

Do you've more information on this? Wikipedia says his mother is Dora Johnston, that doesn't sound like an Indian name.

Picture of Dora: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/34242...

Dora's parents: https://www.geni.com/people/Dora-Philby/6000000013566932381

Looks like I was led astray by a newspaper article today, thanks for the correction. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby-was-a-...

He wasn't an aristocrat, but a hereditary member of the establishment and apparently bought into the whole culture, so implicitly to be trusted.

i remember reading an excellent book called "spycatcher" which details a first-hand account of peter-wright (employed by mi5) exposing kgb spies in the highest echelon of mi5.

Spycatcher was banned in the UK on publication by Margaret Thatcher which a) immediately validated there was truth in its page and b) made it a huge best seller. It's actually a pretty dull book, I think, apart from a few fun stories like breaking into the building sites of embassies and pouring thousands of bugs into the wet concrete walls meaning the entire walls would test as "live" making the whole complex unusable for classified work.

Interesting side-note about Spycatcher for geeks:

In the book, Peter Wright talks about he "and Tony bugging and burgling their way across London in the 1960s".

"Tony" was his engineer who installed bugs. His name was Tony Sale. You best know him, perhaps, as the founder of the Bletchley Park Trust.

After his time with MI5 he decided to restore Bletchley Park and rebuild the machines there like Colossus, etc.

I met him on a visit there in 1999, and I think I was the first person in many, many years who had asked him about his connections, because he seemed slightly taken aback that I knew he was an ex-colleague of Peter Wright's.

Nice bloke. Liked Peter as a man, thought what he'd done with the book was potentially very, very dangerous.

Another interesting factoid... The British government tried to stop publication of Spycatcher in Australia also, but was defeated in court by the man who is now our Prime Minister.

> a) immediately validated there was truth in its page

Alternatively, it was simply a question of the fact that he had broken the agreement he had signed that prevents ex-intelligence officers from publishing memoirs without them going through official screening first.

In the UK, no such agreement exists.

Source: I know people who would have been required to sign it.

They confirm that they would have it screened both out of a sense of duty, and a desire to avoid accidental breach of the Official Secrets Act if they ever produced such memoirs (release it to your agent with something you thought had been declassified? 30 years in prison for you!), but they were not explicitly asked to sign such an agreement.

I would argue that signing the official secrets act constituted just such an agreement

Prior review is a tool that's a lot less critical when you have an Official Secrets Act; in the US, it's illegal to divulge classified information, and you are contractually-bound to seek review of anything you publish, but it's damned hard to unpublish anything that gets out.

Really I thought that Wright went of the deep end and started accusing everybody of being a KGB spy.

Always thought the first rule was never lie, not deny, deny, deny. Watch interviews with former heads of the CIA when asked a question they don't want to answer to see what I mean.

An interview is something different from an interrogation. See for example Gen. Alexanders lies to congress. Even after it's been made clear beyond any reasonable doubt that he was lying he goes to conferences and denies that he was lying when heckled about it. He'll deny and then confuse the audience by casting further doubt.

The CIA are required to lie, by law. Therefore they are extremely good at it.

Exactly which law(s) are you referring to; as in links are requested.

A quote from C. S. Lewis seems apropos: "We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

Here's the BBC Radio programme about the tape: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv

The BBC have had many interesting programmes about Philby and the Cambridge spies. It's really hard to search the BBC website to find these programmes, and many of them are no longer available to listen to. It's odd that the BBC missed the opportunity to have a meta page of all the Philby coverage, linking to the programmes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w or this one

The BBC did have a really interesting viewer for all the meta data at http://open.bbc.co.uk - but that seems to have disappeared.

http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta-bbc/

Full-fat version for non-mobile devices:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bb...

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