Harold Adrian Russell Philby was born in Ambala, India, and educated at Westminster School and the University of Cambridge in England. At Cambridge, while studying history and economics, he met Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt; all four men became Communists and were recruited to spy for the USSR. Working as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Philby submitted profascist newspaper reports, successfully creating a right-wing identity. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco personally presented him with a medal when Franco learned that Philby was the sole survivor of a car full of journalists that was destroyed by an artillery shell.
In 1940 Philby joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6), with the help of Burgess, who was already working there. By 1944 Philby was running MI6's new anti-Soviet section in London and passing information to Moscow. In 1946 he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). In 1949 Philby became chief British intelligence representative in the United States, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From Washington he advised the Soviets in 1950 of a plan to send armed anti-Communist groups into Albania, assuring their defeat.
In 1951 he warned Burgess and Maclean that they were under suspicion, and they defected to the USSR. In the investigation that followed, Philby came under suspicion and was interrogated. He later resigned from the intelligence agency. From 1956 he worked as a journalist in Beirut, Lebanon. Based on information supplied by a defector from the Soviet spy agency, Philby was again interrogated in 1962. In 1963 he fled to the USSR, where he was granted political asylum and Soviet citizenship. He lived there until his death.
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Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby Source |
Philby was the son of the famous Arabist St John Philby, and was born in India, where his father was serving as a magistrate. He was nicknamed Kim, after the hero of Kipling's novel, when he began speaking Punjabi before English. He was recruited to the KGB while still a student at Cambridge, and along with other KGB recruits - Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt - from the same university, eventually became infamous as a member of 'the Cambridge spy ring'.
He rose to be the SIS's liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and the FBI, before he fell under suspicion in 1951 and was recalled to London. There he successfully resisted interrogation. When the SIS refused to reinstate him, he went to the Lebanon as a freelance intelligence agent, under cover as a journalist.
In 1963 testimony from a Soviet defector clinched the case against Philby, and a fellow SIS officer went to Beirut to persuade him to confess to his work for the KGB. Instead, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter and fled to Moscow. There he had a miserable time at first, because the KGB was uncertain whether he was a British intelligence plant.
He was rehabilitated in the early 1980s, became a consultant to the KGB, lectured to young KGB officers and received various Soviet awards and honours. He wrote My Silent War, an account of his life as a KGB penetration agent, and appeared on Soviet television in a programme honouring the British author Graham Greene, his former wartime colleague in the SIS.
In 1988 Philby consented to a week-long interview with The Sunday Times, in which he justified his treachery to his native country by saying that when he made his commitment to the KGB, he believed that the western democracies were too weak to resist the rise of Fascism in Europe and that only the Soviet Union would be able to defeat it.
The release of KGB files after the end of the Cold War cast doubt on Philby's value to Moscow during the years he worked for the Soviet Union. It appeared that many senior KGB officers had discounted his information, arguing that it was 'too good to be true'. Philby never knew any of this because he died, happy and content with his fourth wife, a Russian, Rufina Pukhova, before the collapse of the Communist regime he loved.
His autogiography, My Secret Life was published in 1968.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF KIM PHILBY The Moscow Years. By Rufina Philby (wife), Mikhail Lyubimov and Hayden Peake. Illustrated. 449 pp. New York: Fromm International.
F.O.I.A. Burgess, MacLean and Philby 3219 pages
Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean were British diplomats who disappeared in 1951 and surfaced in Moscow in 1956. There was speculation that Harold "Kim" Philby, head of the Soviet section of the British Secret Intelligence Service, was the "third man" who alerted them before they could be arrested for espionage.
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