Kim

One night last January, Harold Adrian Russell Philby, 51, a British journalist based in Lebanon, headed off for an appointment, telling his wife Eleanor that he would join her later in the evening at a dinner party at the Beirut home of a British embassy official. Philby not only did not show up at the party, but dropped out of sight in Beirut altogether.

In a city from which journalists are always fading into the desert for weeks at a time, the prolonged absence of a correspondent seldom creates much of a stir. But last week Philby's disappearance had become the subject of international investigation and was rattling a twelve-year-old skeleton in the closet of Britain's Foreign Office. For Philby had been accused in the House of Commons of being the "third man" in the 1951 defection to Russia of Communist Spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.

Guest Room for Guy. Son of St. John Philby, the famed desert explorer and Arab scholar, "Kim" Philby carried on an undergraduate flirtation with Communism at Cambridge, where he first knew Burgess. After covering the Spanish Civil War for the London Times, he joined M.I.6--Britain's overseas intelligence branch--during World War II, won the Order of the British Empire for his espionage work. After the war, he transferred to the Foreign Service, in 1949 was posted to the British embassy in Washington as first secretary and chief of security. Though crowded in a house with his second wife and five children, Philby welcomed as a boarder his old Cambridge friend, Guy Burgess, now a junior embassy officer --and a full-fledged Soviet undercover agent.

A year later, with an investigation pending. Burgess and Maclean danced out of Britain a step ahead of the British police. Rumors persisted that the pair had been warned by a government official that the heat was on, and in 1955 a Labor M.P. rose in the House of Commons to accuse Philby of being the tipster. Admitting that Philby had been asked to resign from the Foreign Office because of his friendship with Burgess, Harold Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary, otherwise completely cleared him of any charge of treason or of being the "socalled 'third man,' if indeed there was one." But despite the official exoneration, doubts remained, which were in no way dispelled by Kim Philby's refusal to disavow his friendship with Burgess. "There are fair-weather friends and foul-weather friends," he said, "and I prefer to belong to the second category."

Cables from Cairo. Out of the Government and divorced from his wife, Philby returned to newspapering; seven years ago he went to the Middle East for the Economist and the Observer and married his third wife, Eleanor, whose former husband is Sam Pope Brewer, once the New York Times's Middle East correspondent. Shy and mild-mannered, Philby sometimes drank heavily, last Christmas took a tipsy fall, gashing his head so badly that 24 stitches were needed to close the wound.

After his disappearance, Philby's wife first notified Beirut police, then called them off after receiving the first of several letters and cables from her husband sent from Cairo. Though she maintained that Philby was off on a story, neither the Observer nor the Economist knew anything about an assignment. Finally, the two papers asked the Egyptian and Lebanese authorities to investigate. Officials of both countries reported that there was no record either of Philby's leaving Lebanon or entering Egypt. To quiet the trackers, Eleanor Philby last week displayed another cable, sent from Cairo's Cosmopolitan Hotel. "All going well," it read. "Arrangements our reunion proceeding satisfactorily. Letters with all details following soon. All love. Kim Philby."

Eleanor Philby claimed that the "reunion" was for their wedding anniversary --which, however, was last Jan. 24. In Cairo, authorities said that Philby had not registered at the Cosmopolitan Hotel and that the signature on the telegraph blank did not match his.

A Beirut paper reported that Philby had been seen in Prague. In Moscow, Guy Burgess said he had not seen his old friend.

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