05 Mar Kim Philby, a Real Russian Spy
A USSR stamp: Kim Philby, 1990.
From my book, Liberty Lady: A True Story of Love and Espionage in WWII Sweden:
Hedy couldn’t have helped but notice one good-looking MI6 officer, Harold “Kim” Philby, who roamed in and out of (OSS Agent Jim) Angleton’s office on Ryder Street. In 1944, Angleton had no idea that his friend and mentor had become a Soviet agent soon after his graduation from Cambridge University. Philby and four of his classmates, the Cambridge Five, had been sending whatever top secret information they could get their hands on—the codebreaking, the identities of agents, the Double Cross—straight to Moscow.
In early 1944, even before D-Day, a new division known as Section IX was created by British Intelligence to combat Soviet espionage. It was clear to the Western Allies that the Soviet Union was to be the new threat. The greatest irony is that Kim Philby, the Soviet mole who worked in the same building as Hedy on London’s Ryder Street, would become coordinator of this anti-Soviet intelligence operation.
It wasn’t until 1963 that British agents had proof against Philby. He had been working in Beirut as a British news correspondent and was both a British agent and a Soviet mole. Late in the evening of January 23, 1964, Kim Philby fled Beirut by cargo ship to the Russian port of Odessa.
Over the course of Kim Philby’s 30-year career as a double agent, thousands of people died because of his traitorous betrayals. After his defection to Moscow, he was never given a meaningful job and continued to drink heavily until, one year to the day after Angleton’s demise, he died from heart failure. The New York Times remembered Kim Philby as the double agent who betrayed his country.
Related Post: A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre (one of my favorite books)
In 1951, two of Philby’s friends in British intelligence, former Cambridge classmates, were exposed as Soviet agents and escaped to Moscow. Rampant rumors claimed that Philby was the “third man” who had warned them. He was sent back to London, interrogated and denied everything. How could he, such a fine gentleman and friend, be guilty, after all?
On November 7, 1955, the Prime Minister finally announced in the House of Commons that Mr. Philby was not the “so-called ‘third man’ if indeed, there was one. Shortly thereafter, the exonerated Philby held a press conference in his mother’s London home. His answers to the reporters’ questions were downright lies delivered so smoothly that films of the interview are still used as a training tool by MI6. (Source: Mr. Macintyre’s book, p. 194)
Kim Philby (far right) in his mother’s London home on the day of the press conference.
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