Kim Philby

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Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby (OBE: 1946-1965), (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988) was a high-ranking member of British intelligence, a communist, and spy for the Soviet Union's NKVD and KGB.

In 1963, Philby was revealed as a member of the spy ring known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have done the most damage to British and American intelligence, providing classified information to the Soviet Union that caused the deaths of scores of agents.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Espionage activities 3 Postwar career 3.1 Washington, D.C. 3.2 Beirut 4 Moscow 5 Chronology 6 Philby in popular culture 6.1 Literature 6.2 Film and television 6.3 Music 7 External links 8 Notes 9 References

[edit] Early life

Born in Ambala Haryana, India, Philby was the son of St. John Philby, the British Army officer, diplomat, explorer, author, and Orientalist who converted to Islam and was advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia. He was nicknamed after the protagonist in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim about a young Irish Indian boy who spies for the British in India during the 19th century. After leaving Westminster School in 1928 at the age of 16 Philby studied history and economics at Trinity College, Cambridge where he was introduced to and became an admirer of Communism. It has been suggested that his father, while not a spy himself, was opposed to the British establishment and was thus Kim Philby's inspiration and probable mentor.^[1] The elder Philby died in 1960.

Philby asked one of his tutors Maurice Dobb how he could serve the Communist movement. Dobb referred him to a Communist front organization which in turn passed Philby to the Comintern underground in Vienna Austria. The front organisation was the World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism in Paris France. The World Federation was one of innumerable fronts operated by the German Communist Willi Münzenberg who was a leading Soviet agent in the West.

[edit] Espionage activities

The Soviet intelligence service itself (then the OGPU) recruited Philby on the strength of his work for the Comintern. His case officers included Arnold Deutsch [OTTO], Theodore Maly [MAN], and Alexander Orlov [SWEDE]. Each of them suffered under Stalin's purges.

In 1933, Kim Philby went to Vienna to aid refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany. There he met Litzi Friedman, a Jewish Communist whom he married and brought to Britain to save her life. (The alliance did not outlast the Spanish Civil War.) In 1936, as ordered by Moscow, Philby began cultivating a pro-fascist persona, appearing at Anglo-German meetings and editing a pro-Hitler magazine. In 1937, he went to Spain to cover the Civil War, first, as a freelance journalist, and then as correspondent for The Times — reporting the war from Francisco Franco's perspective. Among his espionage duties for the Soviets was the writing of spurious love letters (interlaced with codewords), addressed to a girl in Paris who lived on the Rue de Grenelle. Only years later did he discover to his fury that the letters were actually addressed to the Soviet Embassy and that the possibility existed he could have been so easily found out. In December 1937, near the Spanish town Teruel, a shell hit the car in which he was traveling, killing three fellow journalists, but only wounding Philby, whom Franco decorated for bravery.

In 1940, Guy Burgess, who was working in Section D of SIS (later MI6) introduced him to Marjorie Maxse, an SIS officer, and Philby was recruited as a British intelligence officer. When Section D itself was destroyed (and Burgess booted out), Philby, who had been an instructor in the arts of "black propaganda", was retained and appointed as head of Section V, the Iberian Section, in charge of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, and Africa. As head of counter-espionage, Philby performed his duties so successfully, according to Seale and McConville, that he not only neutralized the Abwehr's attempts to sabotage British shipping, but he also came to the attention of "C", Sir Stewart Menzies, who in 1944 appointed him to the key position as head of the new Section IX: counter-espionage against the Soviet Union. As a Soviet agent, Philby had accomplished something of a coup.

All went well for Philby until August, 1945, when Constantine Volkov, an officer of the NKVD (later KGB) decided to defect to Britain with the promise that he would reveal the names of Soviet agents in SIS and the Foreign Office. When the report reached Philby's desk, with a bit of luck and clever scheming, he managed to get the assignment. He thus flew to Istanbul by way of Cairo. What with the plane being delayed by storms, the ambassador being on his yacht in the Bosporus, the Russians had time to whisk Volkov off to Moscow and Philby returned to London after a close call.

After the war, Philby was sent as Head of Station to Istanbul under the cover of First Secretary to the British Embassy. While there, he received a visit from Guy Burgess. In 1949, Philby's next — and last — assignment was as First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, where he acted as liaison between the British Embassy and the newly formed CIA. His luck ran out, however. First came the discovery of the cryptonym HOMER (Donald Maclean) in the VENONA decrypts — a "jigsaw puzzle" of decrypts, decoded piecemeal because some Soviet code clerk had used a one-time pad twice; then came another visit from Guy Burgess who ensconced himself in the Philby household for a year and proceeded to behave very badly. Burgess was declared persona non grata, as was Philby soon after.

After the defection of Burgess and Maclean, Philby was asked to resign from SIS, and he spent the next several years being questioned by MI5 and SIS. Since he did not break, however, he was finally cleared of being the "Third Man" by the Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons. Eventually he was re-employed as an SIS agent, with the cover as a correspondent in Beirut for The Observer and The Economist.

Always in danger of having his cover blown by the next Soviet defector, Philby, confronted by new evidence brought to him by an old SIS friend, Nicholas Elliott, finally defected to the Soviet Union in January 1963, departing Beirut on the Soviet freighter Dolmatova.

[edit] Postwar career

After these two disasters, the CIA and MI6 largely gave up their attempts to plant agents in Soviet territory. Philby was also able to tell Moscow just how much the CIA knew about its operations. Moscow asked Philby not to bother saving spies who had served their purpose, but he sat on several reports that revealed the names of other Soviet spies anyway.

In January 1949, the British Government was informed that Venona project intercepts showed that nuclear secrets were passed to the Soviet Union from the British Embassy in Washington in 1944 and 1945 by an agent code-named 'Homer'. In 1950, Philby was asked to help track down this agent. Knowing from the start that 'Homer' was his old university friend, Second Secretary Donald MacLean, Philby warned MacLean in 1951, leading to his two friends' defection (and ultimately to his downfall).

[edit] Washington, D.C.

In October 1949 Philby arrived in Washington as British intelligence liaison to the newly created U.S. intelligence agencies under the National Security Act of 1947. Philby received Venona material which the U.S. was sharing with the UK, but he did not have information about the source, since Venona was one of the most highly rated top secrets. He shared a house in Washington, at 4100 Nebraska Avenue, N.W, with his friend from the Cambridge days, fellow British diplomat, intelligence officer and Soviet penetration agent, Guy Burgess.

In 1949, Philby was in Washington, D.C., as the MI6 liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The two agencies launched an attempted revolution in Soviet-influenced Albania. The exiled King Zog had offered his troops and other volunteers to help, but, for three years, every attempted landing in Albania met with a Soviet or Albanian Communist ambush (the Soviets knew the emergency radio call routine). Philby's betrayal cost 300 Albanian lives, and a similar betrayal occurred in the Ukraine. Couriers would travel to Soviet territory and disappear, and no useful information was coming out.

Philby is believed to have passed to Moscow information on the United States' small stockpile of atomic weapons and its capacity (at that time, severely limited) to produce new atomic bombs. Based in part on that information, Stalin went ahead with a 1948 blockade of West Berlin and began a large-scale offensive armament of Kim Il Sung's North Korean Army and Air Force that would later culminate in the Korean War. The latter conflict would later consume the lives of over one million Koreans, and about 30,000 U.S./Allied soldiers and marines.

When MacLean was identified in April 1951, surveillance commenced to obtain evidence independent of Venona, as the U.S. and UK did not want to reveal the existence of Venona. MacLean defected to Moscow with Guy Burgess a month later in May 1951. Philby came under instant suspicion as the third man who had tipped them off.

That year, Philby resigned under a cloud, and was denied his pension until an internal investigation failed to come up with definitive proof of his treachery. On October 25, 1955, against all expectations, he was 'cleared' by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in an ill-timed statement made in the House of Commons: "While in government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously, and I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called 'Third Man,' if indeed there was one."

[edit] Beirut

Thus, in 1956 Philby was again in the employ of MI6 as an "informant on retainer" and was supposedly involved in Operation Musketeer, the British, French, and Israeli plan to attack Egypt and depose Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Better attested is his role as Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Economist, which also led to his exposure. Sometime in late 1962, a British-Jewish woman, Flora Solomon, was attending a cocktail party in Tel Aviv and made a comment about how Philby, the journalist in Beirut, displayed sympathy for Arabs in his articles. She said that his masters were the Soviets and that she knew that he had always worked for them. The comment was overheard by someone at the party and was relayed to the offices of MI5 in London, which sent Victor Rothschild to interview her. Mrs. Solomon declared that she would never testify against Philby, but she admitted that he had told her he was a spy and had tried to recruit her to the Communist cause.

Although MI5 and MI6 could not immediately agree on how to deal with Philby, it was eventually agreed that a personal friend of Philby from his MI6 days, Nicolas Elliott, would be sent to confront him in Beirut. There seemed to be a constant leak of information and it is alleged that there was a high-level mole in MI5 those days. Although it is unclear whether Philby was aware of the developments against him vis-a-vis Flora Solomon or whether he knew about the defection of Anatoly Golitsyn (which led to the arrest, escape, and defection to Moscow of fellow MI6 officer and Soviet agent George Blake), there is evidence that in the last few months of 1962 Philby began to drink heavily and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. Philby may have also been warned by Yuri Modin, a top Soviet handler who had served in the Soviet embassy in London, when he travelled to Beirut in December 1962. Modin was the controller of the "Cambridge Five".

It is reported that the first thing that Philby said upon meeting with Elliott was that he was "half expecting" to see him. Many sources claim that he confessed immediately when confronted with the evidence,^[2] while others, including Philby himself, have maintained that he continued to downplay the accusations. Although a further interrogation was scheduled in the last week of January 1963, Philby disappeared on January 23. Records later revealed that the Dolmatova, a Soviet freighter was called to port in Beirut on this date and had left so quickly its cargo remained scattered on the dock.

[edit] Moscow

Kim Philby surfaced in Moscow, and quickly discovered that he was not a colonel in the KGB, but still just agent TOM. It was 10 years before he walked through the doors of KGB headquarters. He suffered severe bouts of alcoholism. In Moscow, he seduced MacLean's American wife, Melinda, and abandoned his own wife, Eleanor, who left Russia in 1965.^[3]

According to information contained in the Mitrokhin Archive, the head of KGB counterintelligence, Oleg Kalugin met Philby in 1972 and found him to be 'a wreck of a man'; "The bent figure caromed off the walls as he walked. Reeking of vodka, he mumbled something unintelligible in atrocious, slurred Russian."

Over the next few years Kalugin and the Young Turks in the Foreign Intelligence Directorate rehabilitated Philby, using him to devise active measures, and to run seminars for young agents about to be sent to Great Britain, Australia, or Ireland. In 1972 he married a Russian woman, Rufina Pukhova, who was twenty years his junior, with whom he lived until his death at age 76, in 1988. His autobiography "My Silent War" was published in the West in 1968. Only posthumously did he receive the praise and appreciation which had escaped him in life; he was awarded a hero's funeral and numerous posthumous medals by a grateful USSR.

Philby was a close friend of the novelist Graham Greene, who reportedly left MI6 rather than become involved in exposing Philby. Greene's biographer, Norman Sherry, had this to say:

’Perhaps Greene, always intuitive, resigned because he suspected that Philby was a Russian penetration agent. … If Greene did suspect Philby, it would be just the kind of thing that would catapult him out of the service rather than share his suspicions with the authorities.’^[4]

[edit] Chronology

• 1912 Birth in India
• 1919 Attended Aldro preparatory school in Eastbourne
• 1924 Was a King's Scholar at Westminster School
• 1929 Entered Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of 17 to read history.
• 1930 Guy Burgess arrived at Trinity from Eton.
• 1931 Joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society. Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald defeated 27th October. Philby became a more ardent socialist. After obtaining only a third in his history exams he transferred to economics.
• 1932 Became treasurer of the Cambridge University Socialist Society.
• 1933 Left Cambridge a convinced Communist with a degree in economics, then went to Vienna where Chancellor Dr Engelbert Dollfuss was preparing the first 'putsch' in February 1934. Philby became a Soviet agent.
• 1934 Clash between the Austrian government and socialists in Vienna. On 24 February Philby married Alice (Litzy) Friedmann, born Kohlmann; then in May, after the collapse of the socialist movement in Vienna, he returned with his wife to England. He began work as a sub-editor of a Liberal monthly review, and joined Guy Burgess as a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. (Philby edited the fellowship's pro-Hitler magazine, supported by Nazi funds). To cover up his communist background he also made repeated visits to Berlin for talks with the German Propaganda Ministry and with von Ribbentrop's Foreign Office.
• 1937 In February Philby arrived in Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War from Franco's side. 20 May 1937 he became correspondent of The Times with Franco's forces.
• 1938 Awarded the 'Red Cross of Military Merit' by Franco personally.
• 1939 In July, left Spain and became war correspondent of The Times at the British Headquarters in Arras.
• 1940 In June, after the evacuation of British Forces from the European mainland, he returned to Britain. Recruited by the British Secret Service and attached to the Secret Intelligence Service under Guy Burgess in Section D. Assigned to school for under-cover work, but later transferred to the teaching staff of a new school for general training in techniques of sabotage and subversion at Beaulieu, Hampshire.
• 1941 Transferred to MI6, Section V (Five). Philby took charge of the Iberian sub-section, responsible for British Intelligence in Spain and Portugal. Trained James Jesus Angleton in the arts and crafts of counterespionage.
• 1942 Married his second wife Aileen Furse. Office of Strategic Services group under Norman Pearson arrived in London for liaison with British Secret Service. Philby's area of responsibility grew to include North African and Italian espionage under newly formed counter-intelligence units.
• 1943 Section V moved from St Albans to London, bringing Philby closer to the centres of power.
• 1944 Appointed head of Section IX, newly created to operate against communism and the Soviet Union.
• 1945 In September Soviet intelligence officer Konstantin Volkov based at the Soviet embassy in Ankara seriously threatened Philby's position by offering to defect and provide the names of two agents working in the Foreign Office and one in MI6 (probably Philby). The offer was sent to Philby as head of the Section IX, Soviet counterintelligence. Soon afterwards, Volkov was kidnapped by Soviet agents and taken to the Lubyanka in Moscow for interrogation and execution.
• 1946 Took a field appointment - officially as First Secretary with the British embassy in Turkey, actually as head of the Turkish MI6 station.
• 1949 Became MI6 representative in Washington, as senior British Secret Service officer working in liaison with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the newly created CIA. He occasionally visited Arlington Hall for discussions about VENONA; furthermore, he regularly received copies of summaries of VENONA translations as part of his official duties. He sat in on a Special Policy Committee directing the ill-fated Anglo-US attempt to infiltrate anti-communist agents into Albania to topple the Enver Hoxha régime.
• 1950 Guy Burgess arrived in Washington on assignment as Second Secretary of the British Embassy, and Philby invited him to stay at his house.
• 1951 Philby learnt of the tightening net of suspicion surrounding Foreign Office diplomat and Soviet agent Donald Maclean, whose British embassy position at the end of the war had placed him on the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Energy as its British joint secretary. Burgess's alcoholism caused Ambassador Franks to remove him and he returned to England. On 25 May, Burgess and Maclean disappeared from Britain, with help from Philby, having escaped via the Baltic to the Soviet Union. Philby summoned to London for interrogation and asked to resign from the Foreign Service.
• 1952 In the summer a secret trial took place in which Philby underwent questioning about his activities.
• 1955 The British Government published a 'White Paper' (report) on the Burgess-Maclean affair. On October 25, questions tabled in parliament asking about the 'third man', Philby. Harold Macmillan, foreign secretary in the Eden cabinet, stated that no evidence existed of Philby having betrayed the interests of Britain. Nevertheless, the Foreign Service dismissed him because of his association with Burgess.
• 1956 In September British secret service arranged Philby to work for The Observer in Beirut as correspondent of and also The Economist; But that year Dick White, who suspected Philby of working as a Soviet agent, became head of MI6.
• 1957 Aileen, Philby's second wife, died.
• 1958 Married Eleanor Brewer.
• 1962 George Blake unmasked. Philby then confirmed as an identified Soviet agent.
• 1963 23 January, Philby disappeared in Beirut. The Soviet Union announced that it has granted Philby political asylum in Moscow. On 3 March, Mrs. Philby received a telegram from Philby postmarked Cairo, Egypt. On 3 June Izvestia located Philby with the Imam of Yemen. On 1 July, the British Government admitted that Philby had worked as a Soviet agent before 1946 and identified him as the 'third man'.
• 1965 Awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the highest honours of the Soviet Union.
• 1971, marries Rufina Ivanovna in Moscow.
• 1988 Death at the age 76.

[edit] Philby in popular culture

[edit] Literature

• The Tim Powers novel Declare is partly based on unexplained aspects of Philby's life, providing a supernatural context for his behavior ("tradecraft meets Lovecraft").
• In the Ted Allbeury novel The Other Side of Silence (1981) Philby, near the end of his life, asks to return to Britain.
• The Frederick Forsyth novel, The Fourth Protocol, features an elderly Kim Philby advising a Soviet leader on a plot to influence a British election in 1987.
• The Robert Littell novel The Company features Philby as a confidant of former CIA Counter-Intelligence chief James Angleton.
• Graham Greene's novel The Human Factor explores aspects of Philby's story.
• William F. Buckley, Jr.'s novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton
• William F. Buckley, Jr.'s novel Last Call for Blackford Oakes
• Chris Petit's novel The Passenger.
• John le Carré's novel (also a BBC television mini-series) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy focuses on the hunt for a Soviet agent patterned after Philby.
• The novel Fox at the Front by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson depicts Philby selling secrets to the Soviet Union during the alternate Battle of the Bulge where German Field Marshall Erwin Rommell turns on the Nazis and assists the Allies in capturing all of Berlin. Before he can sell the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, he is discovered by the British and is killed by members of MI5 who stage his death as a heart attack.

[edit] Film and television

• Cambridge Spies, a 2003 four-part BBC drama, starring Toby Stephens as Kim Philby, Tom Hollander as Guy Burgess, Rupert Penry-Jones as Donald Maclean, and Samuel West as Anthony Blunt, which is told from Philby's point of view, recounts their lives and adventures from Cambridge days in the 1930s, through World War II, until the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951.

• The 2005 film A Different Loyalty is an unattributed account taken from Eleanor Philby's book, "Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved." The film recounts Philby's love affair and marriage to Eleanor Brewer during his time in Beirut, and his eventual defection to the Soviet Union in late January of 1963. The names of all characters, including the lead characters, have been changed, and the film becomes highly speculative at the end.

• In the 1987 film The Fourth Protocol starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan, Kim Philby is portrayed by Michael Bilton.

• The character "Harry Lime" in the 1949 film The Third Man has been said to be based on Kim Philby, although Graham Greene has denied this. It is ironic that a few years later, Philby was suspected of being the "third man" in the spy scandal.

• In the 2006 film The Good Shepherd MI6 agent Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup) is very loosely based on Philby (thereby rendering the title character played by Matt Damon a loose rendition of CIA agent, James Jesus Angleton).

• Traitor is a television play loosely based on Philby's life.

[edit] Music

• "Philby" by Rory Gallagher from the Top Priority album (1979) in which he draws parallels between his life on the road and Philby's.
• Philby, an unproduced musical by Katie Baldwin (book and lyrics) and Alan Moon (music).
• "Kim Philby", by the now-defunct Vancouver band Terror of Tiny Town, is a polka-esque retelling of some of Philby's story.

[edit] External links

• Annotated bibliography of the Philby Affair
• Kim Philby (BBC)
• Burgess, MacLean and Philby, FBI FOIA
• Kim Philby was here

[edit] Notes

1. ^ See Anthony Cane Brown, Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century, 1994
2. ^ See for example Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files
3. ^ Eleanor Philby, Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, 1967, London: Hamish Hamilton. Eleanor Philby died in 1968.
4. ^ Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two:1939-1955, (Jonathan Cape, London, 1994), p.183

[edit] References

• Kim Philby, My Silent War, published by Macgibbon & Kee Ltd, London, 1968, or Granda Publishing, ISBN 0-586-02860-9. Introduction by Graham Greene
• Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, 1968, published by André Deutsch, Ltd., London.
• Eleanor Philby, Kim Philby: The Spy I Married, 1967, published by Ballantine Books, New York. Published in the UK as Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved by Hamish Hamilton (1967).
• Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, 1973, published by Hamish Hamilton, London.
• Hayden Peake, "The Philby Literature" in The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years by Rufina Philby, Mikhail Lyubimov, and Hayden Peake. St. Ermin's Press, 1999.
• Rufina Philby, The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years, 1999, published by Fromm International, New York.
• Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files, 1994, published by Little, Brown & Company Limited, Canada, ISBN 0316910155 . Introduction by Phillip Knightley.
• Phillip Knightley, Philby: KGB Masterspy 2003, published by Andre Deutsch Ltd, London, ISBN 0233000488.

See also:

• Richard Beeston, Looking For Trouble: The Life and Times of a Foreign Correspondent, 1997, published by Brassey's, London.
• Desmond Bristow, A Game of Moles, 1993, published by Little Brown & Company, London.
• Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, 2001, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York.
• Anthony Cave Brown, "C": The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill, 1987, published by Macmillan, New York.
• Anthony Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century, 1994, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
• John Fisher, Burgess and Maclean, 1977, published by Robert Hale, London.
• S. J. Hamrick, Deceiving the Deceivers, 2004, published by Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, 1986, published by W.W. Norton & Company, London.
• Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, 1994, published by Farrar Strauss Giroux, Paris.
• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove: Chronicles of Wasted Time: Number 2, 1974, published by William Morrow & Company, New York.
• Barrie Penrose & Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, 1986, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, New York.
• Nigel West, editor, The Guy Liddell Diaries: Vol. I: 1939-1942, 2005, published by Routledge, London
• Nigel West & Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, 1998, published by Yale University Press, New Haven.