Kim Philby

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Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby (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. Of the "Cambridge Five" espionage cell, Philby is believed to have effected the most damage to British and American intelligence, providing classified information to the Soviet Union that caused the deaths of scores of agents, and indirectly, the Korean War.

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.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Spy and traitor 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 References

[edit] Early life

Born in Ambala, India, Philby was the son of St. John Philby, the British 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.

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] Spy and traitor

The Soviet intelligence service itself (then the OGPU) recruited Philby on the strength of his work for the Comintern. Anatoly Gorsky, the London Rezident, was his case officer.

His first job as a Soviet spy was under the cover of a journalist for The Times, first in Austria, then during the last two years of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, as ordered by Moscow, Philby began cultivating as 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 free-lance journalist, then for The Times — reporting the war from Francisco Franco's perspective. On December 31, 1937, a shell hit the car in which he travelled, killing the three other journalists travelling, but only wounding Philby; Franco decorated him for bravery. As sole survivor of the explosion, he became known in media and other circles. Unfortunately for the Soviets, Philby's new recognition thwarted their original plan for using Philby to organize and execute the assassination of Franco.

In 1940, Guy Burgess introduced him to the head of MI6, and he was recruited as an intelligence agent. He was assigned a key job in the Iberian section, with orders to counter the Nazi spy threat in Spain and Portugal, and to protect vital shipping in the Mediterranean.

In 1943, a young case officer working under Philby proposed exploitation of the German Wehrmacht leadership's losing faith in Hitler. He suggested encouraging a German officer rebellion, before Germany surrendered. The idea got no further than Philby's desk. Philby knew that the Soviets wanted Germany destroyed and wished to occupy the country to install a client state.

In 1944, MI6 promoted Philby to head the Russian Espionage section. His treachery made useless any attempt to gather human intelligence on Russia, as British agents in Soviet territory were quickly caught and killed with the information he provided to the NKVD (later the KGB). Philby also managed to keep himself informed about other KGB agents in high places.

In August 1945, the newly-appointed Russian consul in Turkey approached British diplomats with an intelligence offer. He wanted £27,000 and political asylum; in return he would reveal to them Soviet spy operations in Turkey, and the particulars of their entire espionage network. Additionally, he would name the KGB's spies in the Foreign Office and in Counter Intelligence. Such information was too sensitive for the diplomatic personnel in Istanbul, so it was passed to MI6; twenty days later, Intelligence Officer Kim Philby arrived in Istanbul, apologizing for his delay. The Russian diplomat never contacted them again. The reason became clear after a Soviet military aeroplane landed at Istanbul airport. A heavily-bandaged figure was rushed aboard, and the plane took off for the Soviet Union. The diplomat had been betrayed by Philby, one of the moles he was planning to unmask.

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.

[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.

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". He was supposedly given the position of second-in-command to the point man for Operation Musketeer, the British, French, and Israeli plan to attack Egypt and depose Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, given Philby's sympathies, it can only be supposed, if this truly occurred, that his role was less one of support, than of subversion.

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, 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.

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 and MI6 deputy director 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.’^[1]

References:

1. ^ Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two:1939-1955, (Jonathan Cape, London, 1994), p.183

[edit] Chronology

• 1912 Birth in India
• 1919 Attended Aldro preparatory school in Eastbourne
• 1924 Went to 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 centers 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.
• 1967 Marries American born Melinda Marling MacLean, the former wife of Donald Duart MacLean in Moscow shortly after her divorce from Philby's compatriot.
• 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.

[edit] Film and television

• Cambridge Spies a 2003 four part BBC drama

• The 2005 film A Different Loyalty is alleged to be a truthful account of 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.

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

[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).

[edit] External links

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

[edit] References

• My Silent War by Kim Philby, published by Macgibbon & Kee Ltd, London, 1968, or Granda Publishing, ISBN 0-586-02860-9. Introduction by Graham Greene
• The Philby Literature by Hayden Peake in The Private Life of KIM PHILBY The Moscow Years by Rufina Philby, Mikhail Lyubimov, and Hayden Peake. St. Ermin's Press, 1999.
• The Philby Files by Genrikh Borovik, published by Little, Brown & Company Limited, Canada, 1994, ISBN 0-316-19284-9. Introduction by Phillip Knightley