1951Tips off fellow Cambridge Spy Donald Maclean that a warrant has been issued for his arrest. [11][pageneeded], Philby provided Stalin with advance warning of Operation Barbarossa and of the Japanese intention to strike into southeast Asia instead of attacking the Soviet Union as Hitler had urged. Donald refused to become part of the twilight brigade community of defectors, down-at-heel, disillusioned and wondering how they had got there. Aileen Philby resented him and disliked his presence; Americans were offended by his "natural superciliousness" and "utter contempt for the whole pyramid of values, attitudes, and courtesies of the American way of life". [43][pageneeded] Clearly there had been leaks and Philby was later suspected as one of the leakers. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957.[91]. The news that Philby, a former MI6 officer, had been spying for the Russians since 1933 sounded an alarm in Whitehall. Burgess' defection to Moscow with Maclean in 1951 cast suspicion on Philby snr. [10], Philby acted as a courier between Vienna and Prague, paying for the train tickets out of his remaining 75 and using his British passport to evade suspicion. Want to Read. Their fifth child, Harry George, was born in 1950. [85], Philby found work in the early 1970s in the KGB's Active Measures Department churning out fabricated documents. 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. No connection with Philby was made at the time, and Krivitsky was found shot in a Washington hotel room the following year. In 1965, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Harry St John Bridger Philby CIE (born 3 April 1885, Badulla, British Ceylon - 30 September 1960, Beirut, Lebanon), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah ( ), his Arabic name, was an Arabist, explorer, writer, and British colonial office intelligence officer. It is also true, she said, that he tried to kill himself at one point. Philby worked at first as a freelance journalist; from May 1937, he served as a first-hand correspondent for The Times, reporting from the headquarters of the pro-Franco forces. [78][pageneeded] Philby was under virtual house arrest, guarded, with all visitors screened by the KGB. They took the train to Zurich, where they changed trains to Schwarzach in Austria. He was 65. He fell for her the moment he met her among the bohemian set he socialised with in Paris, where he was a British diplomat. In his early teens, he spent some time with the Bedouin in the desert of Saudi Arabia. This entailed responsibility for a network of undercover operatives in several cities such as Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier. Contained in the traffic (intercepted and decrypted as part of the Venona project) was information that documents had been sent to Moscow from the British Embassy in Washington. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.[2]. Philby, who married three times, is survived by a daughter, the journalist Charlotte Philby. Nonetheless, the information was publicized in 1967 when Philby granted an interview to Murray Sayle of The Times in Moscow. Officially, his post was that of First Secretary to the British Embassy; in reality, he served as chief British intelligence representative in Washington. [50] Burgess was sent back to England, where he met Maclean in his London club. [35] In early 1944, as it became clear that the Soviet Union was likely to once more prove a significant adversary to Britain, SIS re-activated Section Nine, which dealt with anti-communist efforts. Solomon introduced Philby to the woman who would become Philby's second wife, Aileen Furse. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. I think that he was of Czech origin; about 5ft 7in, stout, with blue eyes and light curly hair. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. "There was one funny incident," she remembered. Philby was a 19-year-old art student when his father was exposed in 1963 as a traitor. To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets. 'in Russian", "The Cambridge Spies' West Hampstead connection", "Kim Philby: new revelations about spy emerge in secret files", "Spies Philby's widow tells of an Englishman's life in exile", "Moscow square named after notorious British double agent Kim Philby", "A Cold War Mystery: Was the Soviet Mole Kim Philby a Double Agent or a Triple Agent? Philbys defection sent ripples of shock across Western intelligence and is often described as one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War. He had been ordered to investigate Maclean, another double agent who had been passing British secrets to the Soviets. In a way hes always just been my father. [67] When Nicholas Elliott met Philby in late 1962, the first time since Golitsyn's defection, he found Philby too drunk to stand and with a bandaged head; he had fallen repeatedly and cracked his skull on a bathroom radiator, requiring stitches. He never promised to give up, but once, completely unexpectedly, he suddenly said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to lose you, I'm not going to drink any more.' When they had not returned on the Sunday night, her mother was frantic. Jubilee Statistical Yearbook]", "The national economy of the USSR for 70 years. The two men said very little and the interview lasted barely five minutes. Solomon went to work for the British retailer Marks & Spencer. Philby or his Russian bosses dreamed up this claim so he would not be seen as a traitor to democratic Britain. Philby planned to infiltrate five or six groups of migrs into Soviet Armenia or Soviet Georgia, but efforts among the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits. He reported to the Soviet NKVD from the Spanish civil war under the guise of a correspondent for the Times, and in 1940 joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6), becoming a double agent and passing many secrets to the Kremlin. But he also did it to impress her. In December 1937, during the Battle of Teruel, a Republican shell hit just in front of the car in which Philby was travelling with the correspondents Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press, Bradish Johnson of Newsweek, and Ernest Sheepshanks[21] of Reuters. Harry St John Bridger Philby, CIE (3 April 1885 - 30 September 1960), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah ( Arabic: ), was a British Arabist, adviser, explorer, writer, and a colonial intelligence officer who served as an advisor to King Abdulaziz al-Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia . Upon her return to Istanbul in late 1948, she was badly burned in an incident with a charcoal stove and returned to Switzerland. Philby, though, began seeing Melinda on the side, confessing as much to his wife and saying that he was just trying to make [Melindas] life happier as she had been miserable for the last 15 years. [20] However, such an act was never a real possibility; upon debriefing Philby in London on 24 May 1937, Maly wrote to the NKVD, "Though devoted and ready to sacrifice himself, [Philby] does not possess the physical courage and other qualities necessary for this [assassination] attempt."[20]. Philby suffered only a minor head wound. After the magazine's owner changed the paper's role to covering Anglo-German trade, Philby engaged in a concerted effort to make contact with Germans such as Joachim von Ribbentrop, at that time the German ambassador in London. Half sister of Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby. When he died, in 1988, he was buried with honors by the Soviet authorities. A more serious threat to Philby's position had come to light. 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. George Blake, who is still alive, got on well with him than with Philby. Macleans outward calm in the face of exile was greatly bolstered by his wifes support. Death. [11][pageneeded]. Colonel David Smiley, an aristocratic Guards officer who had helped Enver Hoxha and his Communist guerillas to liberate Albania, now prepared to remove Hoxha. 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 and Pukhova married in 1971, when he was 59 and she was 38. Will former US government informant face terror charges inIndia. LONDON Kim Philby, called the "spy of the century" because of his work for the Soviet Union while a senior officer in British intelligence, died Wednesday in Moscow, the Foreign Office said. To order a copy for 15, visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. Harold Adrian Russell Philby, ; 1 1912, , 11 1988, ) . In 1948, troubled by the heavy drinking and frequent depressions that had become a feature of her husband's life in Istanbul, she experienced a breakdown of this nature, staging an accident and injecting herself with urine and insulin to cause skin disfigurations. He took a job at a monthly magazine, the World Review of Reviews, for which he wrote a large number of articles and letters (sometimes under a variety of pseudonyms) and occasionally served as "acting editor. They had access to the special shops reserved for the Soviet elite, and were able to import canned goods and drinks from Denmark. 4 Comments. These lapses by Philby aroused intense suspicion in Moscow. [ | ] 1912 ' ( '), . Born in 1946, Dudley Tommy Philby is the third of Kims five children with his second of four wives, Aileen Furse Philby. But for intelligence history aficionados it marked the 50th anniversary of the escape to Moscow of notorious double spy Harold Adrian Russell Philby. On 23 May, concerned that Maclean had not yet fled, Philby wired Burgess, ostensibly about his Lincoln convertible abandoned in the Embassy car park. He used a simpler system for MI6, delivering post at Hendaye, France, for the British embassy in Paris. Melinda walked out on her husband, leaving the children with Donald, and moved in with Philby. [62], In Lebanon, Philby at first lived in Mahalla Jamil, his father's large household located in the village of Ajaltoun, just outside Beirut. Philby, one of the few British intelligence officers operating in America at the time, was an obvious possibility. Following Aileen Philby's death in 1957 and Eleanor's subsequent divorce from Brewer, Philby and Eleanor were married in London in 1959 and set up house together in Beirut. By the time he arrived in Turkey, three weeks later, Volkov had been removed to Moscow. 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. Although the father seemed to be an almost heroic figure in the son's eyes, the master spy never explained his treachery to him. Eventually, Tommy visited Kim five times in Moscow in the 1970s. [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. From 1952, Philby struggled to find work as a journalist, eventuallyin August 1954accepting a position with a diplomatic newsletter called the Fleet Street Letter. However, his son told The Telegraph that his fathers contribution to the physical demise of Western intelligence operatives is overstated: there is no information that anyone died as a result of Kim Philbys treachery, he said. [citation needed], The SIS planned to interrogate Maclean on 28 May 1951. Harry St. John Philby, () 3.73 avg rating 11 ratings. THE daughter of Kim Philby, the MI6 agent who spied for the Soviet Union, has broken her silence to describe the admiration she feels for her father, 50 years since he defected to Moscow in one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War. Philby's work led to the deaths of dozens of British agents, making him a reviled traitor once he was exposed in Britain. The investigation into the British Embassy leak continued and the stress of it was exacerbated by the arrival in Washington, in October 1950, of Guy BurgessPhilby's unstable and dangerously alcoholic fellow Soviet spy. In our final extract, she secretly joins him behind the Iron Curtain. [39][5], The intervention of Philby in the affair and the subsequent capture of Volkov by the Soviets might have seriously compromised Philby's position. J. Edgar Hoover complained that Burgess used British Embassy automobiles to avoid arrest when he cruised Washington in pursuit of homosexual encounters. We all loved him enormously. Philby had other less damaging routines: a cup of Russian tea at 7am and English tea with milk at 5pm, drunk from a fine porcelain cup. [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. 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. He graduated in 1933 with a 2:1 degree in Economics. Litzi lived in Paris before returning to London for the duration of the war; she ultimately settled in East Germany. He. Source for information on Philby, Harry St. John Bridger: The Columbia . He drank to excess, hit her, and often disappeared. Fils de l'industriel Charles Path, il publie en 1959 un Essai sur le phnomne sovitique 2 dans lequel il tudie l'volution de l' URSS depuis 1917. She sensed that the Macleans marriage was a difficult one again, with Donald on occasion still getting hopelessly drunk. When young Philby's mother died in 1957, none of her children was invited to the funeral, and he never knew where she was buried. [65] Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer recently stationed in Beirut who was a friend of Philby's and had previously believed in his innocence, was tasked with attempting to secure Philby's full confession. 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 . Although she would be left pitied, even censured, and alone in a country in which she had spent barely one-tenth of her life, it might be better that he should be free to live a new life in Moscow than spend a decade behind bars. And here he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears. His cover story was that he was a political migr, a trade union leader persecuted in England for his political views. But the two men, for so long ideological comrades, fell out. She would be his silent witness for all the difficult years ahead. "But he never got aggressive, and just went to bed. He was known to have been friends with the brazenly gay and immoderate Burgess, who had lived for a time in Philby's house on Nebraska Avenue in Washington. From April 1950, Maclean had been the prime suspect in the investigation into the Embassy leak. I knew what I wanted to know and that was the end of the affair. Philby had to help discover the identity of "Homer" but also wished to protect Maclean. Some could never quite come to terms that he was a traitor. I replied 100, which I hoped would last me about a year in Vienna. But such treatment did not last and they were quickly dispatched to the closed city of Kuybyshev, 600 miles east of Moscow far away, they were told, from British assassination squads. You can give that to the International Organisation for Aid for Revolutionaries. Life is good here in every way.. He was implicated in a similar campaign in Albania. There, he underwent MI5 interrogation aimed at ascertaining whether he had acted as a "third man" in Burgess and Maclean's spy ring. 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. The photographs depict many of the protagonists in this political and military struggle, including Colonel T.E. By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org | "[23], Philby, "employed in a Department of the Foreign Office", was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946.[41]. He was a man of considerable cultural background. "[20], In 1938, Walter Krivitsky (born Samuel Ginsberg), a former GRU officer in Paris who had defected to France the previous year, travelled to the United States and published an account of his time in "Stalin's secret service". During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one-time pad to transmit intelligence traffic. 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