Philby's work led to the deaths of dozens of British agents, making him a reviled traitor once he was exposed in Britain. After all, they won the war.'". The new London rezident, Ivan Chichayev (code-name Vadim), re-established contact and asked for a list of names of British agents being trained to enter the Soviet Union. In his early teens, he spent some time with the Bedouin in the desert of Saudi Arabia. From April 1950, Maclean had been the prime suspect in the investigation into the Embassy leak. Nonetheless, the information was publicized in 1967 when Philby granted an interview to Murray Sayle of The Times in Moscow. [11][pageneeded]. He had got afraid that I would leave, and hidden the boot.". Philby died of heart failure in Moscow in 1988. He was able to order new books from Bowes & Bowes bookshop in Cambridge, who checked with MI5 whether they should be supplying him. 00:50 GMT 17 Apr 2018 And this was the line Melinda presented to MI5 after his defection with fellow mole Guy Burgess: she had been every bit as duped as theyd been. He feared that she would dump him because he was just a boring official in the British diplomatic service so to make myself look better and more important, I told her the reason why I led such a life. Harry St. John Bridger Philby, 1885-1960, British explorer, official, and author. Chicago-born Melinda, whom he married in France in 1940, knew all along that Donald was a spy. She cashed a substantial cheque, bought her toddler daughter some new clothes and settled an outstanding garage bill. The two-drink tradition remained but in time there was no longer a need to hide the bottle, she added. [14] Philby later recalled: Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a "man of decisive importance". A similar lapse occurred with a report from the Imperial Japanese Embassy in Moscow sent to Tokyo. Years after the war, Sir Hardy Amies, who had served as an intelligence officer during the war, recalled that Philby was in his mess and on being asked what the infamous spy was like, Hardy quipped, "He was always trying to get information out of memost significantly the name of my tailor". Alamy. Hed been worried about leaving her and their children to carry on without him, but shed given him the all-clear to go. On their first night in Moscow, an elated Burgess and Maclean had dined in style on a great hotel balcony on the first floor overlooking the Kremlin and got drunk on vodka. His controller in Paris, the Latvian Ozolin-Haskins (code name Pierre), was shot in Moscow in 1937 during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. 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It was a mystery. Aileen died in 1957, when Tommy was just 11 years old; his contact with his father was cut off as soon as the double spy defected to the USSR in January 1963. George Blake, who is still alive, got on well with him than with Philby. By the time he arrived in Turkey, three weeks later, Volkov had been removed to Moscow. He would say we and our when speaking of the Soviet Union and defended his adopted countrys brutal crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 an event that disgusted many Left-wing supporters back in the UK. They lived together for three years, until a younger woman caught the philandering Philby's eye. [11][pageneeded], A more serious incident occurred in August 1945, when Konstantin Volkov, an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain for himself and his wife. Philby claimed to have overheard discussion of this by chance and sent a report to his controller. [70] The Dolmatova, a Soviet freighter bound for Odessa, had left Beirut that morning so abruptly that cargo was left scattered over the docks;[58] Philby claimed that he left Beirut on board this ship. When her brother-in-law, Alan Maclean, asked her whether she would join Donald if she knew for sure that he was behind the Iron Curtain, she gave a firm No. Halfway there, they switched cars and drove to a small airport in the Soviet zone of Austria. But he also did it to impress her. He didn't seem to mind. In 1964 when he was 20, the young Philby was fined 15 and placed on probation for two years for stealing, with two friends, a radio, alcohol, cigarettes and cash valued in all at 75 from a sports pavilion at Greenwich. Volkov's defection had been discussed with the British Embassy in Ankara on telephones which turned out to have been tapped by Soviet intelligence. Melinda, it turned out, had driven to Lausanne, where tickets were waiting and luggage had been left in a station locker. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. He said that there was no discipline there; he made friends with the archivist, which enabled him for years to take secret documents home, many unrelated to his own work, and bring them back the next day; his handler took and photographed them overnight. [61], It is unclear whether Philby had been alerted, but Eleanor noted that as 1962 wore on, expressions of tension in his life "became worse and were reflected in bouts of deep depression and drinking". His own comment was "I do not say that people were happy under the regime but the CIA underestimated the degree of control that the Authorities had over the country. He spent the rest of his professional life as a self-employed joiner. To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets. For the Soviets, Philby was an invaluable asset, ensuring the correct use of idiomatic and diplomatic English phrases in their disinformation efforts. [79]Mikhail Lyubimov, his closest KGB contact, explained that this was to guard his safety, but later admitted that the real reason was the KGB's fear that Philby would return to London. Her mood changed, though, with Stalins death in March 1953 and the prospect that the Soviet Union might now become a more open place. On the 50th anniversary of Philbys defection to Moscow, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph carried an article with excerpts of interviews with one of Philbys sons, Dudley Thomas Philby, and his Russian widow, Rufina Pukhova Philby. In June 1934, Deutsch recruited him to the Soviet intelligence services. After leaving Cambridge, Philby worked as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of France. Burgess predeceased him by 20 years, carried off by angina, an abused liver and hardening of the arteries. Philby had to help discover the identity of "Homer" but also wished to protect Maclean. [27] His time at Section D, however, was short-lived; the "tiny, ineffective, and slightly comic" section[28] was soon absorbed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the summer of 1940. His wife Eleanor joined him in Moscow, and the Philbys and the Macleans spent a lot of time together, going to the ballet or just having dinner and playing bridge. Working from genuine unclassified and public CIA or US State Department documents, Philby inserted "sinister" paragraphs regarding US plans. After Donald Maclean fled to Moscow to escape arrest in Britain as the spy who, for 15 years, had passed state secrets to the Soviet Union, friends of his wife, Melinda, found it easy to believe that she knew nothing of her husbands treachery. The gang of British spies who ended up in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s were employed in KGB training schools and international research institutes. JOHN Philby, the eldest son of Soviet spy Kim Philby, who was a double agent and the notorious Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s, has died in England. [89], In 1940, he began living with Aileen Furse in London. Volkov had insisted that all written communications about him take place by bag rather than by telegraph, causing a delay in reaction that might plausibly have given the Soviets time to uncover his plans. But it wasnt true. Harry George Philby Birth. As a result of this accident, Philby, who was well-liked by the Nationalist forces whose victories he trumpeted, was awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit by Franco on 2 March 1938. I hope you've enough decency left to understand why. I replied 100, which I hoped would last me about a year in Vienna. Will former US government informant face terror charges inIndia. In 1965, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Melinda translated Russian stories into English for the weekly English paper, Moscow News. This role allowed him to conduct sabotage and instruct agents on how to properly conduct sabotage. It is also true, she said, that he tried to kill himself at one point. One of five siblings, he was born under a kitchen table during an air raid on London in World War II. The Macleans lived well, housed in a smart building overlooking the river, in a splendid six-room flat which they gradually filled with bric--brac and furniture shipped from home. By the time she left Russia, Maclean was in his final decline, in and out of hospital with cancer from his lifetime of smoking. [6] Following in the footsteps of his father, Philby continued to Westminster School, which he left in 1928 at the age of 16. She was an object of both pity and fascination, and to get away from it all, she moved from their house on the Kent-Surrey border to Switzerland, with her mother. "Kim" Philby, history, interviews, KGB, MI6, News, NKVD, Rufina Pukhova-Philby, UK, USSR. No connection with Philby was made at the time, and Krivitsky was found shot in a Washington hotel room the following year. Philby admired the strength of her political convictions and later recalled that at their first meeting: A frank and direct person, Litzi came out and asked me how much money I had. In a 1981 lecture to the East German security service (the Stasi), Philby attributed the failure of the British Secret Service to unmask him as due in great part to the British class systemit was inconceivable that one "born into the ruling class of the British Empire" would be a traitorto the amateurish and incompetent nature of the organisation, and to so many in MI6 having so much to lose if he was proven to be a spy. [63] From 1960, Philby's formerly marginal work as a journalist became more substantial and he frequently travelled throughout the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen. 149", "Up on the Catwalk Lyrics Simple Minds", The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, Annotated bibliography of the Philby Affair, File release: Cold War Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean, "Kim Philby: The Spy Who Loved Me" by Charlotte Philby, 12 June 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kim_Philby&oldid=1139360835, Belgian comic authors Olivier Neuray and Valerie Lemaire wrote a series of three historical comics entitled "Les Cinq de Cambridge" involving Kim Philby. His father Harold ''Kim'' Philby was a product of the British ruling class but, like his own eccentric father, the explorer and Arabist St John Philby, contemptuous of it. In Vienna, working to aid refugees from Germany, Philby met Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann), a young Austrian communist of Hungarian Jewish origins. Philby resigned from MI6 in July 1951. In fact, Philby and Maclean's fellow spy, Burgess, were intimate friends; tipped off by Philby, who organised their defection, they fled to Moscow. He was 65. Change). Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying, January 24, 2013 Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby ORB, OL ODN (1 January 1912 11 May 1988)[1] was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. Philby had defected to the Soviet Union from Beirut in 1963, and was treated with respect, but felt isolated. He had five, one of whom, incidentally, was named after George Washington, the American president. They travelled together in Spain through August 1939. [66] She recalled returning home to Beirut from a sight-seeing trip in Jordan to find Philby "hopelessly drunk and incoherent with grief on the terrace of the flat," mourning the death of a little pet fox which had fallen from the balcony. They even had a dacha a country cottage 20 miles from Moscow where the children could swim, fish, bicycle and forage for mushrooms. She lived separately from Philby, settling with their children in Crowborough while he lived first in London and later in Beirut. "[59] Following this, Philby gave a press conference in whichcalmly, confidently, and without the stammer he had struggled with since childhoodhe reiterated his innocence, declaring, "I have never been a communist. This entailed responsibility for a network of undercover operatives in several cities such as Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier. However, when Elliott asked him to sign a written statement, he hesitated and requested a delay in the interrogation. [11][pageneeded] In early 1934, Arnold Deutsch, a Soviet agent, was sent to University College London under the cover of a research appointment, but in reality had been assigned to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities. The man described himself as Otto. But for intelligence history aficionados it marked the 50th anniversary of the escape to Moscow of notorious double spy Harold Adrian Russell Philby. Henry was born circa 1823, in Loughton, Essex, England. For most of us, January 23, 2013, was a day like any other. Speaking on the anniversary of his late fathers defection, he described him as a very kind man and a very good father, who had his belief [in] communism [and] carried it out. Philby's award of the Order of the British Empire was cancelled and annulled in 1965. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. He was given a hero's funeral, and posthumously awarded numerous medals [87] by the Soviets: Order of Lenin, Order of the Red Banner, Order of Friendship of Peoples, Order of the Great Patriotic War, Lenin Medal and Jubilee Medal "Forty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 19411945". [3], On the evening of 23 January 1963, Philby vanished from Beirut, failing to meet his wife for a dinner party at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, First Secretary at the British Embassy. He and Pukhova married in 1971, when he was 59 and she was 38. She emphasised the strength and goodness of their fathers moral and political beliefs as a committed communist who wanted peaceful co-existence between East and West. [5], Elena Modrzhinskaya at GUGB headquarters in Moscow assessed all material from the Cambridge Five. BROWN:: St. John Philby was born in Ceylon, then a part of the British Empire, very typically English ruling-class family, military background, senior military appointments and one of the colonists who went out to build the coffee industry in Ceylon at the turn of the century.They were an upper-middle-class family of repute Danish origin going back to the 16th century, and much admired in . At this point, however, Philby and Friedmann separated. Given all that Melinda had gone through, the pity she had had to accept and the dissembling she had had to practise, that first meeting overseen by Soviet officials was a strained affair. In our final extract, she secretly joins him behind the Iron Curtain. ", Pukhova, now 78, said she was irritated by stories about Philby's drink problem, but admitted he wasn't always able to stick to his two-glass rule. The KGB would stamp the documents "top secret" and begin their circulation. An Indian Civil Service officer turned Arabist and explorer, he spent 20 years travelling across the desert on camelback charting Saudi's unexplored Empty Quarter, crossing paths with Lawrence of. Harry St John Philby on his 1917 trek across the Arabian Peninsula, which he recorded in his 1922 book 'Heart of Arabia'. n ADAPTED from A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps, to be published by The Bodley Head on April 26 at 20. [85], Philby found work in the early 1970s in the KGB's Active Measures Department churning out fabricated documents. "[8], Upon Philby's graduation, Maurice Dobb, a fellow of King's College, Cambridge and tutor in Economics, introduced him to the World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, an organization based in Paris which attempted to aid the people victimized by Nazi Germany and provide education on oppositions to fascism. Burgess was arrested in September for drunken driving and was subsequently fired,[29] while Philby was appointed as an instructor on clandestine propaganda at the SOE's finishing school for agents at the Estate of Lord Montagu[30][pageneeded] in Beaulieu, Hampshire. [58] Following the departure of his father and stepbrothers for Saudi Arabia, Philby continued to live alone in Ajaltoun, but took a flat in Beirut after beginning an affair with Eleanor, the Seattle-born wife of New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer. The situation in Washington was tense. , where tickets were waiting and luggage had been the prime suspect in the early 1970s in the desert Saudi! Civil War and the Battle of France one point and Krivitsky was found shot a!, Rufina Pukhova-Philby, UK, USSR is still alive, got on well with him than Philby. Early teens, he was awarded the Order of the Times in Moscow station! # x27 ; t seem to mind, NKVD, Rufina Pukhova-Philby, UK, USSR Philby #. 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