Young Philby by Robert Littell

’29, who gravitated toward Marx’s analysis of the inevitable decline of industrial capitalism, who with the rise of Hitler in Germany came to see the Soviet Union as the bulwark against Fascism. I had even located the epicenter of this political seism: It was in the sacrosanct halls of Cambridge University in the medieval town of Cambridge, more precisely in one of Cambridge’s several colleges, Trinity. In the early years of this decade, the nascent Socialist movement on campus limited itself to reading the Daily Worker aloud at meetings, pamphlet writing, and late-night discussion groups where, with any luck, the members of the Socialist Society could discuss the Socialist girls straight into bed. With the arrival of a handful of genuine proletarians, namely half a dozen miners from the coal face who ate the cores when they ate apples, a local Communist cell came into existence; the miners, who roped drums of coal to their waists and dragged them out of airless tunnels, had taken part in the bitter thirty-week general strike of 1926 only to be bought off with scholarships to Cambridge. I wasn’t really interested in the miners. My idea was to recruit young and eager upper-class leftist intellectuals from the Socialist and Communist ranks willing to transfer their loyalties to the internationalist anti-Fascist movement. We would then channel their professional careers in the hope they might wind up working as Fleet Street journalists or junior Foreign Office clerks. If we were diligent in selecting talented recruits, they would, with the passage of time, rise through the ranks to positions of consequence, giving us access to the state’s thinking, perhaps even to the state’s secrets.
    Such was the proposition that Moscow Centre was mulling with its usual lack of enthusiasm for original ideas when Harold Adrian Philby literally fell into my lap.
    I should say straightaway that Philby’s name was not unknown to me. His potential for recruitment had been put forward in Vienna by a young Hungarian-Jewish comrade who worked for the Centre. Her name was Litzi Friedman. One of the semimonthly reports from her controller, cryptonym Arnold, mentioned a young upper-crust British Socialist fresh from Trinity College, Cambridge; the Friedman woman described him as an ardent anti-Fascist who had motorcycled from Britain to Austria to join in the struggle against the dictator Dollfuss. Moscow Centre was intrigued enough to assign the Englishman the German cryptonym Söhnchen (Sonny in English) and dispatch me to Vienna to sit in on one of Arnold’s meetings with the Friedman woman. I was careful to position myself in a corner of the room filled with shadow. I remember Litzi Friedman commending the young Englishman as a committed Marxist and a fast learner, someone capable of keeping secret things secret should Moscow Centre decide to recruit him as an agent. In Vienna Sonny wound up sharing a bed with Litzi Friedman where, one supposes—for her sake one hopes —he was as ardent a lover as he was anti-Fascist. After Dollfuss crushed the Austrian Socialist opposition, Sonny married the Friedman woman at the Vienna town hall so she would qualify for a British passport and then fled with her to the safety of London. The centre, in its infinite wisdom, instructed me to resume contact with Litzi Friedman and sound her out again about the possibility of recruiting as an active agent the British gentleman who was now her lawful wedded husband.
    This I did. I met with her in London on three occasions. At the first meeting she looked at me with undisguised curiosity. “Have we met before?” she asked.
    “What makes you think so?”
    “It’s the triangular mustache. The man who sat in on one of my sessions with Arnold in Vienna was tall and thin like you and had a triangular mustache on his upper lip. It was you, wasn’t it?”
    “I have never been to Vienna,” I replied.
    She laughed. “It was you,” she said. She waved a