why the British establishment protected Philby, whereas the British
deeply resented American criticism of their security and intelligence
services. Philby’s memoirs and even his final interview with a noted
British journalist given just a few months before his death sought to
further muddle Allied cooperation. But by that time, he was only an
exhibit in a museum of the crumbling system he had served.
An interesting postscript to the story of Philby, Maclean, and
Burgess was written by an American historian and novelist, S. J. Ham-
rick, in Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and
Guy Burgess. Hamrick believes that based on a close reading of the
Venonamaterial, the British service was onto the traitors years before
they were discovered. He believes that the British service allowed
Philby to operate in order to pass distorted intelligence about nuclear
weapons and Anglo-American defense plans to Moscow. He notes that
the reason all three were poorly treated on their arrival in the Soviet
Union was that their information was false. See alsoRING OF FIVE.PILYAR, ROMAN ALEKSANDROVICH (1894–1937). Born into
the Polish nobility (his name at birth was von Pilhau), Pilyar joined
the socialist parties of Poland and Latvia as well as the Menshevik
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in his youth.
Following the Revolution of November 1917, he joined the Bolshe-
vik Partyand was active in party work. He joined the Chekain 1920
and was active in the Russian civil warand collectivization. Pilyar
was one of a number of talented Poles who joined the security service
in the heady days of the Revolution. Like Feliks Dzerzhinskyand
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, the first two chiefs of the service, he was
an internationalist rather that a Polish patriot. His Menshevik past
dragged him down, however, as the NKVDbegan to look for traitors
in their midst in 1937. Pilyar and other Poles in the service came un-
der suspicion and almost all perished. He was arrested at the begin-
ning of the Yezhovshchinain May 1937. He was tried and shot four
months later. Pilyar was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957 and is
remembered as the Cheka’s last nobleman.PITOVRANOV, YEVGENY PETROVICH (1915–1999). AKGB
officer whose experience spanned the years of Joseph Stalin, Nikita196 •PILYAR, ROMAN ALEKSANDROVICH (1894–1937)06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 196