MacMillan’s defense of Philby was successful. It was also the worst mistake of his political career: Philby was in fact a Soviet agent.
Bringing evidence against Philby was Col. Marcus Lipton, a member of the Labor Party, and a MP representing Brixton. As a Member of Parliament, Colonel Lipton used the legal concept of “parliamentary privilege” to carry out his investigation of Philby.
MacMillan was successful in his defense of Philby, not because of a preponderance of evidence, nor because he established a reasonable doubt about Philby’s guilt. The defense of Philby was based on an appeal to Philby’s social status and Lipton’s lack of it, not on logical argumentation. Historian Stan Evans recounts the scene:
The smooth-talking diplomat in chief, unflappable as ever, was blandly reassuring: Charges of pro-Red chicanery made against a former high official had been carefully looked into, and there was nothing to them. The accused had been unfairly named and had now been cleared by the security screeners. Just another case, it seemed, of wild allegations by reckless people who didn’t know the facts of record.
Lipton’s case against Philby was dismissed, not because it was irrational, but because it was unpopular, at least among the leadership clique.
Those in power felt that Philby was like them, and therefore couldn’t possibly be guilty. Their social affinity for Philby was so great that it caused them to overlook the evidence which indicated that he was a ‘Red’ - that he was working for the Soviets.
The combative lawmaker who brought the charges wasn’t buying. He had further evidence on the matter, he said, the nature of which he couldn’t reveal but would give to the appropriate committee. This prompted cries of “smear” and demands that the accuser make his outrageous statements off the floor, without legislative privilege, so that he could be sued for slander.
This legal scene in England in the 1950s had its roots two decades earlier. By the early 1930s, Philby, whose full name is Harold Adrian Russell Philby, was already a Soviet agent. His father was a British diplomat, and Philby studied at Westminster and Cambridge. He seemed to be the right sort of person, and acquainted at an early age with powerful people of his generation.
The socialists in England and some European countries hoped that their version of socialism would be seen, and accepted as the antidote to Hitler’s national socialism. Thus presenting themselves as people of goodwill, they hoped that nobody would suspect them of secretly collaborating with Stalin’s intelligence agencies.
As the 1930s intellectual ferment fed the Communist malaise, it had other adverse effects as well. An alternative answer to the cultural breakdown was the Nazi version of the godless faith, which had just come to power in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. As the Brown and Red despotisms fought for supremacy in Europe, each posed as the remedy for the other.
The more moderate socialists of the middle class embraced the volatile Leninist-Marxists as fellow anti-fascists, either not knowing, or ignoring, that the stated goal of these communists was violent revolution in the western democracies.
“For many in England,” Stan Evans writes,
the Communists and the USSR would thus gain added luster as alleged antidotes to Hitler. (A conflict capsuled in the Spanish Civil War of the latter 1930s, as Western leftists flocked to the Loyalist government in Madrid, supported in its fashion by the USSR, in battle against Gen. Francisco Franco, backed by the Italian Fascists and the Nazis.)
Sadly, while resisting the horrific evils of Hitler, many dupes in western democracies played into the hands of Stalin, who was orchestrating a different set of mass murders as he killed millions of Ukrainians in planned famines.
“From this maelstrom came the” generation of willing accomplices, idealistic and naive, who would either knowingly enlist in Stalin’s service as Philby did, or unwittingly cooperate with Soviet agents, “and many others like them, who would be the traitors of our histories.”
From the 1930s through the 1950s to the 1980s, Soviet agents were active in Britain, exporting confidential information and classified national security documents to Moscow. They also steered domestic discussions of policy, manipulating British policy so that it favored the Soviet Union rather than the interests of Englishmen.
