Free Kim Philby by Tim Milne

It may have been difficult for Kim, a natural elitist, to come to terms with humdrum uncongenial work. But I suppose he would have buckled down to it if he had had to; one now sees that he had his eyes on something else, a chance to serve the Russians again.
For the next three years, until we were posted abroad in October 1955, Marie and I saw either the whole family or Kim by himself quite frequently, usually at intervals of a few weeks at most. I had no instructions from my employers not to see him; equally, I had no instructions to see and report on him, thoughKim may possibly have wondered whether I had. Most of his old friends in SIS and other official departments thought it wiser not to know him; indeed I can remember only one other person still so employed who continued to see him at all regularly. One or two who had left, like Dick Brooman-White (by then a Conservative MP) and Jack Ivens, remained faithful. Jack and his Greek wife Nina in particular, intensely warm-hearted people whose politics were probably the opposite of Kim’s, tried to help him. Kim was very genuinely grateful – ‘They’re pure gold,’ he said. Of his and Aileen’s other friends at this time I remember especially Douglas Collins, who had founded the Goya perfume firm, and his wife Patsy, who had been a school friend of Aileen’s. But Tommy and Hilda Harris had retired to Majorca, and seldom came to England: I never saw them after about 1946.
Many people in SIS who, like me, knew very little of the case against Kim clung to the belief that he was innocent of any serious offence, although we recognised we were in no real position to judge. One important thing we did not know – and I only know it now having read My Silent War – was that among the evidence brought against him in the MI5 interrogation were two very sinister little items. Two days after the Volkov information reached London in 1945 there had been a ‘spectacular’ rise in the volume of NKVD telegraphic traffic between London and Moscow, followed by a parallel rise in the traffic between Moscow and Istanbul; and in September 1949, shortly after Kim had learnt that the British and Americans were investigating a suspected leakage from the British embassy in Washington some years earlier, there had been a similar rise in NKVD traffic. Kim does not say whether MI5 showed him any statistics to support these statements or merely left him to take them on trust. Ifthe latter, one cannot exclude that MI5 may have been bluffing a little, and exaggerating lesser rises of a kind that must have occurred frequently. But either way Kim’s reply probably helped to confirm their belief in his guilt: asked if he could explain the jumps in traffic, he replied simply that he could not. This is hardly the reaction of an innocent man. Kim’s line hitherto had been to argue that the reason why Donald Maclean had been alerted to danger was that he had observed both that he was being followed and that certain categories of secret papers had been withdrawn from him; in other words, there was no need to postulate a Third Man. But here was new and independent evidence to suggest that the Russians might have indeed been tipped off, at least about Volkov. One would have expected an innocent man, after very little thought, to have pointed out to his interrogators that, if the figures meant anything at all, then MI5 ought to be looking for someone who was still at large.
I think that if the facts about the NKVD traffic had been generally known in SIS there would have been a much greater tendency to believe Kim guilty. One also wonders to what extent those who briefed Harold Macmillan before his statement in the House of Commons in November 1955 were aware of this particular evidence, on the face of it fairly damning.
The line that Kim took after the disappearance of Maclean and Guy Burgess, as related in his book, contains a further inconsistency. Before he was summoned back from Washington, Kim had