Kim Philby

• 1. Introduction

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  Kim Philby died in Moscow on the 11th of May 1988, buried with the honours of a KGB General. His fourth wife, Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova, told a reporter that he was "disillusioned with Communism by the end of his life, tortured by his failings, and drank himself to death." For more than two decades he had lived in a city he had helped serve, in an empire he had helped protect, that had never fully trusted him. The man who rose higher inside British intelligence than almost anyone suspected, who warned Stalin of Operation Barbarossa, who helped neutralise the Albanian resistance, who lunched weekly with the CIA counterintelligence chief while passing secrets to Moscow, died a Soviet pensioner whose role in training KGB recruits only began a decade after he arrived. How did Harold Adrian Russell Philby get there? What made a boy from British India, educated at Westminster and Cambridge, decide to betray every institution that had given him a career? And how, for three decades, did he avoid being caught?

• 2. A Childhood Built for Subterfuge

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  Harold Adrian Russell Philby was born on the 1st of January 1912 in Ambala, Punjab, British India, to the author and explorer St John Philby and his wife Dora Johnston. His father was a member of the Indian Civil Service at the time, later becoming an advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia. The boy took his nickname from the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. That detail is not incidental. Kim Philby would spend his life performing one identity while inhabiting another.

  At Aldro preparatory school in Shackleford, Surrey, and later Westminster School, which he left in 1928 at age sixteen, Philby showed the discipline and social ease that would later define his career. In his early teens he spent time with the Bedouin in the Arabian desert, learning early that the world was larger and stranger than the one his class assumed. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and economics and graduated in 1933 with a 2:1 degree.

  At Cambridge, his father wrote that Philby exhibited "a leaning towards communism", adding the haunting question: "The only serious question is whether Kim definitely intended to be disloyal to the government while in its service." The answer, as it turned out, was yes. Philby joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society and, following the Labour Party's defeat in the 1931 general election, took a more active role, serving as its treasurer in 1932 and 1933.

• 3. Vienna and the Making of a Spy

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  After graduating, Philby was introduced by his economics tutor Maurice Dobb to the World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, a Paris-based organisation that was in fact one of several fronts run by the German communist Willi Munzenberg, a Reichstag member who had fled to France in 1933.

  In Vienna, working to aid German refugees, Philby met Litzi Friedmann, born Alice Kohlmann, a young Austrian communist of Hungarian Jewish origins. Philby recalled their first meeting with frank admiration: she asked how much money he had, calculated that he had an excess of twenty-five pounds over what he needed for the year, and announced he could give it to the International Organisation for Aid for Revolutionaries. He recalled, "I liked her determination."

  Philby acted as a courier between Vienna and Prague, using his British passport to evade suspicion and paying for train tickets from his remaining seventy-five pounds. He also delivered clothes and money to refugees. After the Austrofascist victory in the Austrian Civil War, Philby and Friedmann married in February 1934, allowing her to travel to Britain with him two months later.

  Arnold Deutsch, a Soviet agent operating under cover at University College London, had been assigned to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities. He had noticed Philby earlier that year in Vienna, where Philby had participated in demonstrations against the government of Engelbert Dollfuss. Philby later wrote of a rendezvous in Regents Park with a man who called himself Otto. He described him as about five feet seven inches, stout, with blue eyes and light curly hair, a man of considerable cultural background who hated London and adored Paris. In June 1934, that man, Arnold Deutsch, formally recruited Philby to Soviet intelligence.

• 4. Spain and the Art of Playing Both Sides

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  In February 1937, Philby travelled to Spain, then locked in a civil war triggered by the coup of Falangist forces under General Francisco Franco against the government of President Manuel Azana. From May 1937, he served as a first-hand correspondent for The Times, reporting from the headquarters of the pro-Franco forces in Seville.

  He was working simultaneously for Soviet intelligence and British intelligence. For the Soviets, he posted letters in a crude code to a fictitious contact, Mlle Dupont in Paris. When he later visited Paris, he was startled to discover that address was the Soviet embassy itself. His controller in Paris, a Latvian national named Ozolin-Haskins with the code name Pierre, was shot in Moscow in 1937 during Stalin's Great Purge. His successor, Boris Bazarov, suffered the same fate two years later.

  Philby's Soviet controller Theodore Maly reported to the NKVD in April 1937 that he had briefed Philby on the need to discover the system guarding Franco and his entourage. The goal was potentially to arrange Franco's assassination. But Maly's own debriefing note, written on the 24th of May 1937, concluded that though Philby was devoted and ready to sacrifice himself, "he does not possess the physical courage and other qualities necessary for this attempt."

  In December 1937, during the Battle of Teruel, a Republican shell hit the car in which Philby was travelling alongside correspondents Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press, Bradish Johnson of Newsweek, and Ernest Sheepshanks of Reuters. Johnson was killed outright; Neil and Sheepshanks soon died of their injuries. Philby suffered only a minor head wound. Franco awarded him the Red Cross of Military Merit on the 2nd of March 1938. Philby later noted that the decoration opened doors: after being wounded and decorated by Franco himself, he became known as "the English-decorated-by-Franco" and officers who had suspected British journalists of communist sympathies suddenly made him welcome.

• 5. Climbing Inside MI6

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  In 1940, on the recommendation of Guy Burgess, Philby joined MI6's Section D, a secret organisation investigating non-military means of attacking enemies. He and Burgess ran a training course for would-be saboteurs at Brickendonbury Manor in Hertfordshire. When Section D was absorbed by the Special Operations Executive in the summer of 1940, Burgess was fired following an arrest for drunken driving. Philby survived and was appointed as an instructor on clandestine propaganda at the SOE's finishing school for agents at the Estate of Lord Montagu in Beaulieu, Hampshire.

  By September 1941, Philby was working for Section Five of MI6, responsible for offensive counter-intelligence. On the strength of his experience in Franco's Spain, he was put in charge of the subsection dealing with Spain and Portugal, overseeing a network of operatives in Madrid, Gibraltar, Lisbon, and Tangier. He provided Stalin with advance warning of Operation Barbarossa, which was initially dismissed as a provocation. He also passed along the Japanese intention to strike into southeast Asia rather than attack the Soviet Union, intelligence that, when confirmed by the journalist and spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo, helped Stalin begin moving troops from the Far East in time for the counteroffensive around Moscow.

  In late 1944, acting on instructions from his Soviet handler, Philby maneuvered through internal SIS politics to replace Major Felix Cowgill as head of Section Nine, the section dealing with anti-communist efforts. When a 1981 lecture to Stasi agents, Philby explained the tactic with characteristc precision: when told to remove Cowgill, he asked whether he was "to shoot him or something." He was told to use bureaucratic intrigue. He called it "a very dirty story", then added, "our work does imply getting dirty hands from time to time but we do it for a cause that is not dirty in any way."

  One officer of German birth, Charles Arnold-Baker, repeatedly voiced suspicions about Philby's intentions but was ignored each time.

• 6. Washington and the Unraveling

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  In September 1949, Philby arrived in Washington as the chief British intelligence representative, officially holding the title of First Secretary to the British Embassy. His office oversaw urgent and top secret communications between Washington and London, and he served as liaison to the CIA and FBI. One of his main CIA contacts was James Jesus Angleton, the same young American counter-intelligence officer Philby had known in London. Angleton remained suspicious but lunched with him every week.

  Philby already knew the threat bearing down on him. During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one-time pad, a catastrophic mistake that allowed American codebreakers to crack normally secure traffic. The resulting Venona project intercepts revealed that a British embassy source, identified as "Homer", had been travelling to New York City twice a week to meet his Soviet contact. Philby understood immediately that Homer was Donald Maclean, whose wife Melinda lived in New York.

  Guy Burgess arrived in Washington in October 1950 as Second Secretary at the British Embassy and moved into the Philby family home. His behaviour became a liability that was difficult to manage. J. Edgar Hoover complained that Burgess used British embassy automobiles to avoid arrest while pursuing homosexual encounters across Washington. The morning after a particularly disastrous and drunken party, a guest returning for his car found Philby and Burgess in the bedroom drinking champagne; both had gone to the embassy but, unable to work, had returned home.

  From April 1950, Maclean had become the prime suspect in the Venona investigation. The SIS planned to interrogate him on the 28th of May 1951. On the 23rd of May, Philby sent Burgess a telegram ostensibly about an abandoned Lincoln convertible in the embassy car park, which read: "If he did not act at once it would be too late", and that Philby "would send his car to the scrap heap." On the 25th of May, Burgess drove Maclean from his home at Tatsfield, Surrey, to Southampton, where both boarded the steamship Falaise to France and proceeded to Moscow.

• 7. Exoneration and Return to the Field

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  Burgess had intended to help Maclean flee, not flee with him. His disappearance made the connection to espionage unavoidable and deeply compromised Philby. Back in London under MI5 interrogation, Philby denied acting as a "third man." In July 1951, he resigned from MI6, preempting his near-certain dismissal.

  He struggled to find work from 1952 onward, eventually accepting a position in August 1954 with a diplomatic newsletter called the Fleet Street Letter. Out of touch with Soviet intelligence and lacking access to material of value, he had nearly ceased operating as an agent altogether.

  On the 25th of October 1955, following revelations in The New York Times, Labour MP Marcus Lipton used parliamentary privilege to ask Prime Minister Anthony Eden whether he was determined "to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby." Philby threatened legal action if Lipton repeated the accusations outside Parliament. Lipton later withdrew his comments. On the 7th of November, Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons: "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." Philby then gave a press conference in his mother's London flat, and calmly, without the stammer he had struggled with since childhood, declared: "I have never been a communist."

  In August 1956 he was sent to Beirut as Middle East correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, with his journalism once again serving as cover for renewed MI6 work. He travelled throughout the Middle East, writing under his own name and under the pen name Charles Garner for subjects he found distasteful.

• 8. Moscow and the Long Aftermath

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  On the evening of the 23rd of January 1963, Philby vanished from Beirut, failing to arrive for a dinner party at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, First Secretary at the British Embassy. The Soviet freighter Dolmatova, bound for Odessa, had left Beirut that morning so abruptly that cargo was left scattered over the docks. Philby later claimed he left on board that ship.

  It was not until the 1st of July 1963 that his flight to Moscow was officially confirmed. Journalist Ben Macintyre speculated that MI6 may have deliberately left open the opportunity for Philby to flee, to avoid an embarrassing public trial. Philby himself thought this might have been the case.

  Upon arriving in Moscow, Philby found that he was not, as he had been told, a colonel in the KGB. He was paid 500 roubles a month, at a time when the average Soviet salary was 80.60 roubles a month in 1960. He was under virtual house arrest, with all visitors screened by the KGB. It was ten years before he received even a minor role training KGB recruits. His closest KGB contact, Mikhail Lyubimov, later admitted that the real reason for the restriction was the KGB's fear that Philby would return to London.

  His memoirs, published in Britain in 1968 under the title My Silent War, described him not as a double agent but as "a straight penetration agent working in the Soviet interest." In January 1988, just months before his death, he claimed publicly that he did not regret his decisions and that he missed nothing about England except some friends, Colman's mustard, and Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce. His wife Rufina described a different interior reality: he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears at the poverty of old Soviet citizens who had won the war. He had attempted suicide by slashing his wrists at some point in the 1960s. The USSR posthumously awarded him the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Friendship of Peoples, and the Order of the Great Patriotic War, First Class.