|Harry St. John Bridger Philby called Jack Philby also Sheikh Abdullah (1885-1960), Arabist, explorer, British colonial office, intelligence operative, born at St. John's, Badulla, Ceylon 3 April 1885, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Was a friend of classmate Nehru, later prime Minister of India. Studied oriental languages under E. G. Browne. As he describes in his autobiography, he "became something of a fanatic" and "the first Socialist to join the Indian Civil Service", and was posted to the Punjab in 1908. Acquired Urdu, Punjabi, Baluchi, Persian, and eventually Arabic languages. Married his first wife in September 1910, with his distant cousin Bernard Montgomery or "Monty" later commander-in-chief of Allied armies during World War II, standing up as best man.
Philby is one of the lesser known but most influential persons in the modern history of the Middle East. In late 1915 Percy Cox, chief political officer of the British Mesopotamian expeditionary force recruited Philby as head of the finance branch of the British administration in Baghdad, cover for work in MI6. Gertrude Bell of the British Military Intelligence Department was his first controller and taught him the finer arts of espionage. The work involved organizing the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks.
For more than 700 years the non-Turkic Hashemite dynasty held title as Sharif of Mecca. The Arab Revolt was organized with the idea of creating a unified Arab state, or Arab Federation from Aleppo in Syria to Aden in Yemen.
In November 1917 Philby was sent to the interior of the Arabian peninsula as head of a mission to Ibn Saud. The Wahabbi chieftan and bitter enemy of Sherif Hussein was sending terrorist raids against the Hashemite ruler of the Hejaz, leader of the revolt. Philby began secretly to favour Ibn Saud over Sherif Hussein as leader of the Arabs, a difference with British policy which was promising support for the Hashemite dynasty in the post-Ottoman world. On his return from Jeddah, Philby met with Sherif Hussein.
Philby felt the Balfour Declaration had betrayed promises made to the Arabs. Like T. E. Lawrence, Philby had "gone native".
After World War I Philby was assigned to Iraq to help with administration of the newly created state. In November 1921 Philby was named chief head of the Secret Service for Transjordan, or what is now all Jordan and Palestine. Here he met his American counterpart Allen Dulles who was stationed in Istanbul. At the end of 1922 Philby travelled to London for extensive meetings with all involved in the Palestinian question. They were Winston Churchill, King George, the Prince of Wales, Baron Rothschild, Wickham Steed, and the head of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann.
Philby was of the view that both British and the Saudi families interests would be best served by uniting the Arabian peninsula under one government from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, with the Saudi's supplanting the Hashemites as Islamic "Keepers of the Holy Places" while protecting shipping lanes on the Suez-Aden-Bombay route of the British Empire. Philby then resigned his post in 1924 over differences on the question of allowing Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Secret Service, however, continued to pay Philby for another 5 years. Shortly after his resignation, Ibn Saud began to call for the overthrow of the Hashemite dynasty. This was completed in 1925, and Philby was put in charge of arranging Ibn Saud's coronation as king of the newly created state of Saudi Arabia.
Ibn Saud adviser
Philby settled in Jeddah and became partners in a trading company. Over the next few years he became famous as an international witer and explorer. Philby personally mapped on camelback what is now the Saudi-Yemeni border on the Rub' al Khali where 126 degree daytime temperatures are not uncommon. Later the Royal Geological Society awarded him their Gold Medal.
In his unique position he became Ibn Saud's chief adviser in dealing with the British Empire and Western powers. He converted to Islam in 1930. In 1931 Philby invited Charles R. Crane to Saudi Arabia to facilitate exploration of the kingdom's subsoil assets. In May 1933 Standard Oil of California (SOCAL) concluded negotiations with Philby for a 60 year contract offering the exclusive concession for exploration and extraction of oil in the Hasa region along the Persian Gulf. This marked the beginning of the decline of British influence in the region and the start of American influence. The personal contacts between the United States and Saudi Arabia were largely channeled through the person of Philby.
By 1934 in an effort to safeguard the port of Aden, Britain had no fewer than 1,400 “peace treaties” with the various tribal rulers of the hinterlands of what became Yemen.
In 1936 SOCAL and Texaco pooled their assets together "East of Suez" into what later became ARAMCO (Arabian-American Oil Company). Philby represented Saudi interests.
In 1937 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, Philby arranged for his son, Kim Philby to become a war correspondent for The Times. The same year Philby began quiet negotiations with Ben-Gurion to allow unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine under Ibn Saud's protection.
Later Philby began secret negotiations with Germany and Spain in the event of a general European war. Neutral Saudi Arabia would sell oil to neutral Spain which then would be transported to Germany.
John Loftus who worked in the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations Nazi hunting unit claims Adolf Eichmann, while on a mission to the Middle East, met with Philby "during the mid-1930's".
Philby Plan
At a February 1939 meeting in London with Ben-Gurion and Weizman, Philby offered substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine if they would support Ibn Saud's son and eventual successor, Faisal as King of Palestine. Months later accompanied by Saudi foreign affairs official Fuad Bey Hamza, Philby proposed to Weizmann and Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) that they pay Ibn Saud £20 million to be used to resettle Palestinian Arabs. Weizman said he would discuss the plan with President Roosevelt. Kim Philby also was present at this meeting. According to Philby the Zionist leadership accepted the "Philby Plan" in early October. However because of the kingdom’s special status as home of the Islamic holy places, the plan was denied when Philby leaked it. The matter wasn't taken up again for another three years.
Meanwhile Philby ran for election to the House of Commons for the British People's Party declaring, "no cause whatever is worth the spilling of human blood" and "protection of the small man against big business". He lost and soon thereafter the war began. Because of his activities he was arrested when he travelled to Bombay on 3 August 1940 under the Defense of the Realm Act Regulation 18b, and was taken to England. Friends such as John Maynard Keynes intervened, and after 7 months he was released without prosecution. It is not known precisely who arranged for release. Shortly thereafter Jack Philby recommended his son Kim to Valentine "Vee Vee" Vivian MI6 deputy chief, who recruited him into the British secret service.
When Harold Hoskins of the U.S State Department visited Ibn Saud in August 1943, he asked if the king would be willing to have an intermediary meet with Chaim Weizmann. In anger Ibn Saud responded he was insulted by the suggestion he could be bribed for £20 million to accept resettlement of Arabs from Palestine. Hoskins reports the king said Weizmann told him the promise of payment would be "guaranteed by President Roosevelt." A month later Weizmann, in a letter to Sumner Welles wrote: "It is concieved on big lines, large enough to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of both Arabs and Jews, and the strategic and economic interests of the United States;...properly managed, Mr. Philby's scheme offers an approach which should not be abandoned."
When the war ended he returned to Arabia. In 1945 at the age of sixty he purchased his second wife, a 16 year old girl, out of the slave market at Taif, about 40 miles outside Mecca. He continued work with ARAMCO. Talk in the king's circle was that Philby as an agent of British Secret service and a Zionist spy. And a Communist. Philby began to provoke a series of spectacular agruments with the king. He claimed the disagreements were caused by the corruption and decadence oil money brought the kingdom.
From Philby ARAMCO learned a great deal about Arabia framed in a manner to strike a sympathetic response in the American people. There were no other sources of information about that country available to the American public. Saudi Arabia was portrayed as "a mirror image of the Old West, a wide, unfenced land where nature was unsubdued, religion was simple and fundamental, and the law of the gun prevailed—the desert of Arabia, as America's last frontier." Little was said of the fanatical nature of Wahhabism or its dark and bloody excesses.
After Ibn Saud's death in 1953 Philby openly criticized the successor King Faisal, saying the royal family's morals were being picked up "in the gutters of the West". He was exiled to Lebanon. In exile he wrote:..the true basis of Arab hostility to Jewish immigration into Palestine is xenophobia, and instinctive perception that the vast majority of central and eastern European Jews, seeking admission..are not Semites at all...Whatever political repercussions of their settlement may be, their advent is regarded as a menace to the Semitic culture of Arabia...the European Jew of today, with his secular outlook...is regarded as an unwelcome intruder within the gates of Arabia."
While in Beirut there was a reconciliation with Kim. The two lived together. The son was reemployed by MI6 as an outside informer on retainer. Kim's assignment again was to spy on his father. Jack Philby was helping further his son's career by introducing him to his extensive network of contacts in the Middle East. Both were symapthetic to Nasser during the Suez Crisis of August 1956. Between Jack's access to Aramco and Kim's access to British intelligence there was little they didn't know about Operation Musketeer, the French and British plan to capture the Suez Canal.
The Soviet Union exposed the entire plan in the United Nations and threatened Britain and France with "long-range guided missiles equipped with atomic warheads."
In 1955 Jack reconciled with the royal family and returned to live in Riyadh. In 1960 on visit to Kim in Beirut while in bed with Kim at his side he said "God, I'm bored" and died. He's buried in the Muslim cemetery in Beirut.
In recent years the theory has been propounded that the OGPU recruited Kim Philby precisely to spy his father who had such powerful influence over the founder of the Saudi state and its connections with the Britain and American oil interests.
Sources
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (2004) Arabian Jubilee, H. StJ. B. Philby, Robert Hale, (1952) Philby of Arabia, Elizabeth Monroe, Pitman Publishing (1973) The Secret War Against the Jews, John Loftus and Mark Aarons, St. Martin's Press (1994) Arabia, the Gulf and the West Basic Books (1980) The House of Saud, David Holden and Richard Johns, Holt Rinehart and Winston (1981) The Philby Conspiracy, Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley, Doubleday (1968) Saudi Arabia and the United States, 1931-2002 by Josh Pollack (2002)