Journalism Is A Dangerous or Is That A Traitorous Profession

For spies that is, like:-

...Kim at 25, an adventurous journalist reporting the Spanish civil war for The Times, his head bandaged from a shell burst.

...When the Spanish civil war broke out, Philby took himself off to the battlefront as a freelance reporter with General Franco’s fascists. In 1937, aged only 25, he became the special correspondent of The Times with Franco. His dispatches in the Times library were slanted in favour of Franco’s forces. One thing stuck in the minds of journalists we spoke to who’d observed him in Spain. He wanted to know details of the movement of Franco’s troops — numbers, directions and regiments — way beyond what readers of The Times needed.

“Maybe,” said Page, “he’d already been engaged by Soviet intelligence.”

Page was right.

That's Kim Philby, the 'third man', and that's the London Times.

And then he moved on to another paper:

After his official clearance, we next see Philby at a picnic in the hills outside Beirut, the Middle East correspondent of The Observer and The Economist at work on a bottle of wine. And then we don’t see him at all.

Great cover, that.

And there's a Jewish/Israel angle:

...he visited the Paris Comintern and on graduation in 1933 he rode his motorcycle to the bloody ideological battleground of Vienna. Eric Gedye, who’d been the Telegraph correspondent in Vienna, told Page that Philby had married a vivacious communist — we tracked down her first husband in Israel — and worked with the underground to smuggle communists out of Austria to safety.

But the punchline of all this?

Here:-

WHEN we published our revelations, I naively expected a demand for reform. Instead there was outrage, directed not at Philby or those who protected him but at us.

Several newspapers ran stories — not discouraged by official sources — that our life story of Philby was a Soviet plant. The accusations that we were handmaidens of the KGB seemed to me the product of minds incapable of confronting a real spy story without constructing an ersatz conspiracy around its origins.

The Philby story was my first prolonged experience as a national newspaper editor of dealing with...for want of a better name, I have to call the political establishment: those overlapping “charmed circles” of influence and power whose strands of DNA were the elite public schools, Oxbridge, the aristocracy, the City and the blue-chip boardrooms, the civil service, the legal profession and the conservative press...a penchant for secrecy, social privilege and the nurturing of an educational elite remained pervasive in the culture and has not been quite expunged to this day. It was a revelation that the closing of the ranks that had allowed Philby to survive was manifest again in the rebukes we earned for exposing him and the cover-up.

by Harold Evans extracted from "My Paper Chase".


And let's add one more item:

Harry St John Philby (father of the spy Kim Philby), was a British soldier and archaeologist...and was also an advisor and confidant of King Ibn Saud.

In May 1939, the British Government brought out its White Paper, which among other things severely curtailed Jewish immigration into Palestine. Jews and many non-Jews criticised and rejected the contents of this White Paper. Philby, however, considered that the British could not, or would not go back on the National Home aspect of their Palestine policy and that it was therefore essential to devise a formula "for spreading the contingent benefits of a suitable settlement of the Palestine issue over every section of the Arab world"...

...Philby's plan, which included a considerable transfer of Arabs form Palestine contained three stages. "The whole of Palestine should be left to the Jews. All Arabs displaced therefrom should be resettled elsewhere at the expense of the Jews, who would place a sum of 20 million pounds sterling at the disposal of King Ibn Saud for this purpose. All other Asiatic Arab countries, with the sole exception of Aden, should be formally recognised as completely independent in the proper sense of the term."...Namier [Lewis Namier was an English historian and Zionist who had served as political secretary to the Zionist Executive between the years 1927-31] wrote, "Philby's idea was that Western Palestine should be handed over completely to the Jews, clear of Arab population except for a `Vatican City' in the old city of Jerusalem."...Philby had looked at the situation in a pragmatic way and considered that his plan would be in the Arabs' best interests.