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Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or '''H.A.R. Philby''' (, 1912 – 11 May , 1988 ) was a high-ranking member of British Intelligence , a Communist , and Spy for the Soviet Union 's NKVD and KGB . 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 . Of the five, Philby is believed to have done the most damage to British and American intelligence, providing classified information to the Soviet Union that caused the deaths of scores of agents. EARLY LIFE Born in Ambala , Haryana , India , Philby was the son of St. John Philby , the British Army officer, Diplomat , explorer, Author , and Orientalist who apparently converted to Islam and was advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud Of Saudi Arabia . He was Nickname d 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 . It has been suggested that his father, while not a spy himself, was opposed to the British establishment and was thus Kim Philby's inspiration and probable mentor.See Anthony Cane Brown, ''Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century, 1994'' The elder Philby died in 1960. 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 . The World Federation was one of innumerable fronts operated by the German Communist Willi Münzenberg who was a leading Soviet agent in the West . ESPIONAGE ACTIVITIES The Soviet intelligence service itself (then the OGPU ) recruited Philby on the strength of his work for the Comintern. His case officers included Arnold Deutsch [OTTO], Theodore Maly [MAN], and Alexander Orlov [SWEDE]. Each of them suffered under Stalin's purges. In 1933, Kim Philby went to Vienna to aid refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany. There he met Litzi Friedman, a Jewish Communist whom he married and brought to Britain to save her life. (The alliance did not outlast the Spanish Civil War .) In 1936, as ordered by Moscow , Philby began cultivating 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 freelance journalist, and then as correspondent for ''The Times'' — reporting the war from Francisco Franco 's perspective. Among his espionage duties for the Soviets was the writing of spurious love letters (interlaced with codewords), addressed to a girl in Paris who lived on the Rue de Grenelle. Only years later did he discover to his fury that the letters were actually addressed to the Soviet Embassy and that the possibility existed he could have been so easily found out. In December 1937, near the Spanish town Teruel , a shell hit the car in which he was traveling, killing three fellow journalists, but only wounding Philby, whom Franco decorated for bravery. In 1940, Guy Burgess, who was working in Section D of SIS (later MI6 ) introduced him to Marjorie Maxse, an SIS officer, and Philby was recruited as a British intelligence officer. When Section D itself was destroyed (and Burgess booted out), Philby, who had been an instructor in the arts of " Black Propaganda ", was retained and appointed as head of Section V, the Iberian Section, in charge of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar , and Africa. As head of Counter-espionage , Philby performed his duties so successfully, according to Seale and McConville, that he not only neutralized the Abwehr 's attempts to sabotage British shipping, but he also came to the attention of "C", Sir Stewart Menzies , who in 1944 appointed him to the key position as head of the new Section IX: counter-espionage against the Soviet Union. As a Soviet agent, Philby had accomplished something of a coup. All went well for Philby until August, 1945, when Constantine Volkov , an officer of the NKVD (later KGB) decided to defect to Britain with the promise that he would reveal the names of Soviet agents in SIS and the Foreign Office. When the report reached Philby's desk, with a bit of luck and clever scheming, he managed to get the assignment. He thus flew to Istanbul by way of Cairo. What with the plane being delayed by storms, the ambassador being on his yacht in the Bosporus , the Russians had time to whisk Volkov off to Moscow and Philby returned to London after a close call. After the war, Philby was sent as Head of Station to Istanbul under the cover of First Secretary to the British Embassy. While there, he received a visit from Guy Burgess. In 1949, Philby's next — and last — assignment was as First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, where he acted as liaison between the British Embassy and the newly formed CIA. His luck ran out, however. First came the discovery of the cryptonym HOMER ( Donald Maclean ) in the VENONA decrypts — a "jigsaw puzzle" of decrypts, decoded piecemeal because some Soviet code clerk had used a One-time Pad twice; then came another visit from Guy Burgess who ensconced himself in the Philby household for a year and proceeded to behave very badly. Burgess was declared Persona Non Grata , as was Philby soon after. After the defection of Burgess and Maclean, Philby was asked to resign from SIS, and he spent the next several years being questioned by MI5 and SIS. Since he did not break, however, he was finally cleared of being the "Third Man" by the Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons. Eventually he was re-employed as an SIS agent, with the cover as a correspondent in Beirut for '' The Observer '' and '' The Economist ''. Always in danger of having his cover blown by the next Soviet defector, Philby, confronted by new evidence brought to him by an old SIS friend, Nicholas Elliott, finally defected to the Soviet Union in January 1963, departing Beirut on the Soviet freighter ''Dolmatova''; While others, including Philby himself, have maintained that he continued to downplay the accusations, 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. CIA operative Miles Copeland , a close friend of Kim Philby, describes how Philby was constantly being suspected of spying for the Soviets but always succeeding to skillfully evade such suspicions, at least for some time. Copeland was once handed an "ultra-thorough checklist" from his superior in an attempt to see if Philby committed any suspicious actions as prescribed by this form. Copeland first objected to the idea of spying on Philby since he was his "friend”, but obliged under pressure later on. After Copeland's painstaking observation was over, he handed in his checklist to his superior, with the result that Philby didn't commit ''any'' suspicious acts, thus none of the points in this checklist were checked. His superior responded by saying: "Aha, now that’s interesting, even a perfectly normal person must have done something, at least one thing, that is deemed suspicious by this checklist."See Miles Copeland, ''Without Cloak Or Dagger: The Truth about the New Espionage, 1974'' 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). 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. 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. 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." Beirut Thus, in 1956 Philby was again in the employ of MI6 as an "informant on retainer" and was supposedly involved in Operation Musketeer , the British, French, and Israeli plan to attack Egypt and depose Gamal Abdel Nasser . 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,See for example Genrikh Borovik, ''The Philby Files'' 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. 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, and abandoned his own wife, Eleanor, who left Russia in 1965.Eleanor Philby, ''Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved'', 1967, London: Hamish Hamilton. Eleanor Philby died in 1968. 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 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.’Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two:1939-1955, ( Jonathan Cape , London, 1994), p.183
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