PHILBY, KIM• 421When Petter’s recruiter, Major Nikolaus Ritter, was captured and
interrogated atBad Nenndorfat the end of the war, he was asked
about Petter, but he could recall very little about him, apart from that
he was fromHamburgand his name may have been Keller.PHANTOM.The commonly known title of GHQ Liaison Regiment,
Phantom was a military signals unit with an existence limited to
World War II created to provide a parallel source of information to
rear-echelon commanders. Phantom consisted of six squadrons, each
equipped with mobile patrols that submitted regular reports on the
progress of battles and provided an essential link between armor, in-
fantry, and air support. The regiment’s best-known officer was Major
David Niven, who commanded A Squadron until he was transferred
to theSupreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forcefor ser-
vice on General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff in 1943.
PHILBY, KIM.Contrary to public perception, Harold Adrian Russell
Philby was never tipped to be a future chief of theSecret Intelli-
gence Service(SIS). He was a philandering, stammering drunk
whose career was destined to be curtailed by the knowledge, ac-
quired secretly byMI5, that he had once been a member of theCom-
munist Party of Great Britain. His first wife,Litzi Friedman,was
a known Soviet agent and three of his children had been born out of
wedlock, which in the 1940s was something of a social stigma. His
heavy drinking, together with his crippling stutter, made him an un-
likely candidate for SIS’s top post, although that myth continues to
be perpetuated even after his death.
Philby joined SIS fromSpecial Operations Executivein Septem-
ber 1941 and was to work closely withGraham GreeneinSection
V’s Iberian subsection. Philby spent his wartime service with SIS in
St. Albans and London, but in 1944 he traveled abroad to Paris,
where he spent a memorable evening withMalcolm Muggeridge.
In November 1951, after foreign postings as SIS’s representative in
Istanbul and Washington, D.C., Philby was cross-examined about his
links toGuy BurgessandDonald Macleanand sacked. In the un-
happy months that followed, Philby tried to eke out an existence as a
journalist, and many of his friends, believing he had been treated un-
fairly, rallied to his support. He worked temporarily for Jack Ivens, a