Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett

Author:Daniel C. Dennett [Dennett, Daniel C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: General, Social Science, Science, Religion, Philosophy, Religious, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Christianity, Atheism, God, Humanism, Sociology of Religion, Religion & Science, Theism, Religion and Sociology, Memetics
ISBN: 9780141017778
Google: FSYJxLz6zmcC
Amazon: 0141017775
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Belief in Belief 237

Or did he? When Philby first showed up in Moscow, he was (apparently) suspected by the KGB of being a British plant—a triple agent, if you like. Was he, in fact? For years a story circulated in intelligence circles to this effect. The idea was that when SIS "exoner-ated" Philby in 1951, they found a brilliant way of dealing with their delicate problem of trust:

Congratulations, Kim, old chap! We always thought you were loyal to our cause. And for your next assignment, we would like you to pretend to resign from SIS—bitter over our failure to reinstate you fully, don't you see—and move to Beirut and take up a position as a journalist in exile. In due course we intend to give you reason to "flee" to Moscow, where you will eventually be appreciated by your comrades because you can spill a lot of relatively innocuous insider information you already know, and we'll provide you with carefully controlled further gifts of intelligence—and disinformation—that the Russians will be glad to accept, even when they have their doubts. Once you're in their good graces, we'd like you to start telling us everything you can about what they're up to, what questions they ask you, and so forth.

Once SIS had given Philby this new assignment, their worries were over. It just didn't matter whether he was truly a British patriot pretending to be a disgruntled agent, or truly a loyal Soviet agent pretending to be a loyal British agent (pretending to be a disgruntled agent...). He would behave in exactly the same ways in either case; his activities would be interpretable and predictable from either of two mirror-image intentional-stance profiles. In one, he deeply believes that the British cause is worth risking his life for, and in the other, he deeply believes that he has a golden opportunity to be a hero of the Soviet Union by pretending that he deeply believes that the British cause is worth risking his life for, and so on.

The Soviets, meanwhile, would no doubt draw the same inference 238 Breaking the Spell

and not bother trying to figure out if Philby was really a double agent or a triple agent or a quadruple agent. Philby, according to this story, had been deftly turned into a sort of human telephone, a mere conduit of information that both sides could exploit for whatever purposes they could dream up, relying on him to be a high-fidelity transmitter of whatever information they gave him, without worrying about where his ultimate loyalties lay.

In 1980, when Philby's standing with his overseers in Moscow was improving (apparently), I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford, and another Visiting Fellow at the time happened to be Sir Maurice Oldfield, the retired head of MI6, the agency responsible for counterespionage outside Great Britain, and one of the spymasters responsible for Philby's trajectory. (Sir Maurice was the model for Ian Fleming's "M" in the James Bond novels.) One night, after dinner, I

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