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The Spy I'll Never BeOctober 24, 2010 Often I don't know what I'm writing about till I've finished a first draft. Fine. I can live with that. I better be able to live with that, because it happens all the time. With this piece I thought I knew what I was writing about, but I was wrong. I thrashed around for weeks before I figured that out -- the thrashing was mostly subconscious, and its external manifestation looked like writer's block. First I thought I was writing about spies. When the digression into my religious upbringing appeared, I thought I was writing about belief. Separate piece, I thought, and took it out. Then I put it back. For days the thing was such a muddle I couldn't bear to look at it. For several weeks I had nothing to show my Sunday night writers' group. I even thought of dropping out. This was ridiculous. I set myself a deadline -- you will finish the Philby piece in time for tonight's meeting -- and spent most of the day working on it. The thing jelled. Now I see that I'm writing about the writer as spy and double agent. Wow. The title hasn't quite caught up with the piece -- or maybe it's just evidence of my own double-agentry? Time will tell. Yes, this is part of To Be Rather Than to Seem. "Kim Philby, hero extraordinaire" it says on my high school yearbook page; the comment was contributed by a tongue-in-cheeky classmate who knew how intrigued I was with the Philby case. Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union in early 1963, after a long and successful career as a Soviet spy in the upper levels of British intelligence (MI6). My self-directed study of the Arab world spawned bilious contempt for the British Empire, and respect for anyone who thumbed his nose at it, but Kim Philby was never my hero. Thumbing your nose at the Brits was one thing, but going over to the USSR? The bloom was off the Soviet rose long before I was born. The main attraction of the Soviet Union was the loathing it inspired in people I couldn't stand. Kim Philby fascinated me, though, and I wasn't alone. In the wake of his defection, while I was in high school, plenty of people were writing about his secret life and times. How could such a highly placed and deeply trusted insider have turned out to be so duplicitous for so long and with such success? I read all the books and articles about him that I could get my hands on. As a teenage Arabist, I had already made the acquaintance of Kim's father, Harry St. John Bridger Philby. Like his only son, the senior Philby was an intelligence officer, in the British Colonial Office. He was stationed in India, and that's where Kim was born and how he came to be nicknamed after the eponymous protagonist of Rudyard Kipling's novel. (Kim's given name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby.) A longtime adviser to Ibn Saud and only the second Westerner ever to cross the Rub al-Khali desert, St. John Philby wrote several books about Arabia. Like his son after him, the senior Philby was highly critical of his own government, but unlike his son he never made a secret of it. Thus he left the Crown's service and threw in his lot with Ibn Saud, who by then had created and made himself king of Saudi Arabia, then a very poor country of dubious prospects. St. John played a key role in making sure that the coveted Saudi oil concession went to Standard Oil of California instead of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Nyah, nyah, I thought; it served the British right for all their double dealing during World War I and at the Versailles peace conference, which (I was convinced at the time) was responsible for 85% of the mess the Middle East was in -- most of the rest I blamed on the French. But Wahhabism, the ultra-fundamentalist Islam of the Saudis, was no more attractive to me than the Soviet Communism of Stalin and his successors. Neither Philby held my interest much past high school. The Englishman who did, and does to this day, was T. E. Lawrence, whose activity in the Middle East overlapped St. John Philby's for several years. Finding his own country wanting, each Philby embraced another. Lawrence found himself immersed in another world before he was estranged from his own. By his own account the experience left him unfit for either one, and he retired from the world stage to the nuts-and-bolts life of an airman in the Royal Air Force. His life and mine could hardly be more different, but in his dilemma I find echoes of, and insights into, my own. On my yearbook page, having achieved the lofty status of a high school senior, I gave my advice to posterity: "Get your facts right, then always go through to the end with whatever you think is right, no matter what it is." The words were from St. John Philby. Looking back, I can't help noticing that the more facts I gather, the less sure I am of what is right and the more reasons I can come up with for not committing myself to any particular side. The Philbys, father and son, apparently did not have that problem. Lawrence quite probably did. In high school, though, I longed for certainties. I wanted to believe in something enough to devote my life to it or risk my life for it. But what? My father was a Democrat, my mother a Republican. This did mean that sweeping anti-parental rebellion was out of the question and I had to think at least a little bit for myself; furthermore, if I wanted to get into political discussions with my father -- which of course I did -- I'd better damn well get my facts right or he'd make hash of my arguments. But though I took electoral politics seriously, I didn't get involved in any campaigns. At sixteen, I was a little too young to "come clean for Gene" McCarthy, and tumultuous 1968 felled hero after hero, hope after hope. I'm wary by nature, and that year didn't make me bolder. Religion didn't offer much promise either. My family belonged to St. Peter's Episcopal Church in my hometown, and we went to church every Sunday, but I can't say I was ever a believer, or wanted to be a believer, or even knew what a believer was. Religion was what we did on Sundays. I loved singing in the junior choir, but it only went through eighth grade. In eighth grade young people in my church went to confirmation class. I had to attend confirmation class, said my parents, and after that I could decide for myself whether I wanted to go to church or not. So at the end of my eighth-grade year I got confirmed, meaning I was now an adult member of the Episcopal Church. What that meant I didn't know. I loved the language of the King James Bible, but I didn't believe what I thought I was supposed to believe. About what I've come to call spirituality I had no inkling at all. I knew many Episcopalians, but I didn't know what was Episcopalian about them. What I did know was that I was now too old for the junior choir, and that had been hands-down what I liked most about church. I stopped going. Studying the Arab world, I learned a lot about Islam, of course, and was even drawn to it, in large part because its expectations, unlike those of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, seemed clear: this was what you were supposed to believe, this was how you were supposed to pray, and this was when you were supposed to fast. You knew when you were doing it right. The only Muslims I met were the foreign students and the occasional professor or journalist, all men, who joined us at Grandma's Sunday dinner table. I didn't know any of them well enough to wonder how being Muslim affected their day-to-day lives, or whether they actually did all those things they were supposed to do. At Grandma's, the Episcopalians and the Muslims acted pretty much alike. While growing up I didn't see many people being passionately committed to anything, religious, political, or artistic. They -- we -- had religious, political, and artistic activities, and even convictions, which we might discuss with considerable heat, but this wasn't a world where people ran off to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Freedom Riders, the bohemians in Greenwich Village, the hippies in San Francisco, or even the circus. If they did, they fell off the edge of the world and were never heard from again. When I ran off to join the antiwar movement, I thought I was just leaving for college. Finally, almost in spite of myself, I was caught up in great events, not just reading about them in books or watching them on TV. I worked alongside men and women who nearly always went through to the end with what they thought was right, including some from the Old Left who'd been doing it since long before I was born. Gradually I discovered that my pick-and-choose mind wasn't comfortable with doctrine, any doctrine. As an antiwar and student government activist, I was flattered when colleagues told me they weren't 100% sure they could count on my vote; I was "too independent," they said. I liked being "too independent." I also knew it would get me shot if the revolution ever came, so I was less than gung-ho for any ideology that promised, or threatened, apocalyptic change. Kim Philby and his fellow Cambridge University students had been singled out and courted by Soviet agents. I still thought that was cool, but I knew that no one recruiting spies for a foreign power, or agents for the FBI, or even employees for a domestic corporation, would ever recruit me. Now that I was living in two different worlds, however, I often felt like a secret agent. In D.C. most people I saw on the streets were black; in my hometown they were nearly all white. In D.C. I got around easily on foot and by bus; at home I had to borrow a car. At home, people knew me or at least recognized my name and knew some of my relatives; at college most of us hadn't met even our close friends' siblings and parents. The more deeply involved I became in the antiwar movement and student activism more generally, the more jarring grew the dissonance. People at home got their information about the movement from TV and the newspapers; I got mine from day-to-day experience. What they knew and what I knew weren't the same things. Sometimes the versions were complementary -- they had the overview, I had the particulars -- but other times they were mutually exclusive. Interpreting one world to the other required patience and care that I often couldn't muster. Leading a double life no longer seemed so exotic, or even all that difficult.
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