[BITList] To Russia, 1963

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Philby,  Harold Adrian Russell  [Kim]  (1912-1988), spy, was born on 1 January 1912 at Ambala in the Punjab, the only son and eldest of four children of Harry St John Bridger Philby  (1885-1960), civil servant in India, explorer, and orientalist, and his wife, Dora (d. 1957), daughter of Adrian Hope Johnston, of the Indian public works department. With unconscious prescience they nicknamed him Kim. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the university socialist society and became a convinced communist. He obtained a third class in part one of the history tripos (1931) and a second class (division I) in part two of the economics tripos (1933). Philby was of medium height with a seductive smile. In 1933 he went on a trip to Vienna, where he met Alice (Litzi) Friedman, an Austrian communist, whose father was Israel Kohlman, a minor government official of Hungarian Jewish origin. They witnessed the street fighting which ended with the defeat of the socialists in February 1934, when they had a hurried marriage and left for England. By this time she had persuaded him to become a Soviet agent. While he was in Vienna the NKVD (the Soviet secret service) had talent-spotted Philby as a potential recruit.

In June 1934, at a secret meeting in Regent's Park, Philby was approached by Arnold Deutsch, a Czech undercover Soviet intelligence officer operating in London. Philby welcomed the suggestion that he should penetrate 'the bourgeois institutions'. Another of his controllers was Teodor Maly, a Hungarian who had renounced the priesthood and become an idealistic convert to Bolshevism. Beginning his career as a journalist, Philby was instructed to sever all links with his communist past and swing over to the far right. Hence his involvement with the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship. First as a freelance and later for The Times he went to Spain in February 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of General Franco (whose planned assassination was part of his original brief), who awarded him the red cross of military merit. He left Spain in August 1939 with his overt right-wing credentials established, while his covert faith in Joseph Stalin remained untarnished by the terror of the mid-1930s, although he had an ambivalent attitude to the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939. His luck never deserted him, especially permitting him to survive the ups and downs of an alternating relationship with the Moscow centre.

After the outbreak of the Second World War Philby went to France as a war correspondent. Returning to England after Dunkirk he was recruited, thanks to Guy Burgess, his friend from Cambridge and a fellow NKVD agent, into the SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6) in July 1940 and soon joined section five (counter-intelligence) in 1941. He set up a base in London with Aileen Furse (the daughter of Captain George Furse of the Royal Horse Artillery), with whom he had children but whom he did not marry until December 1946, a week after his divorce from Litzi. By then he was a rising star, having become in 1944 head of section nine, whose remit was 'to collect and interpret information concerning communist espionage and subversion'. When section nine was merged with section five in 1945 he alerted Moscow to the intended defection in Istanbul of Konstantin Volkov, who could have unmasked Philby. He was appointed OBE in 1946.

In 1946 the SIS posted him to Turkey and in 1949 he became their representative in Washington, where he kept Moscow informed of Anglo-American intelligence collaboration. He also saw how the net was closing in on Donald Maclean. In 1950 Guy Burgess was posted to Washington and lodged with Philby. When Maclean and Burgess fled to Moscow, Philby was summoned back to London and interrogated by MI5, who were persuaded of his guilt, but lacked the evidence of a confession to convict him. The SIS, however, in return for Philby's voluntary resignation, gave him a golden handshake. After his name had been cleared by Harold Macmillan in 1955, the SIS fixed his cover as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, based in Beirut, where he arrived in August 1956.

Aileen died in 1957. There were three sons and two daughters of the marriage; Philby had no other children. In 1959 he married Eleanor Brewer, from Seattle, who was formerly married to Sam Pope Brewer, Middle East correspondent of the New York Times. In Beirut, Philby was successfully reincarnated as a journalist until Anatoly Golitsyn's defection to the CIA in 1962 filled the gaps in the case against him. The SIS and MI5 then confronted Philby with a prosecutor's brief in January 1963, plus an offer of immunity if he returned to London and made a full confession. Philby admitted he had been a Soviet agent but said no more. He quietly arranged his escape and arrived in Russia at the end of January 1963. Five months later he was granted Soviet citizenship.

Eleanor soon joined him, but she so disliked life in Moscow that she left for good in 1965; she died in America in 1968. Meanwhile, Philby had been awarded in 1965 the order of Lenin and the order of the Red Banner. He began an affair with Melinda Maclean, the wife of Donald Maclean, who had also defected to Moscow, but this did not last. Heavy drinking and smoking dominated his life until 1970, when George Blake, another defector, introduced him to Rufina Ivanova, half Polish and half Russian, whom he married in 1971. She was the daughter of an expert on the chemical treatment of furs. In 1980 his award of the order of Friendship of Peoples preceded his East German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Cuban decorations. He died in Moscow on 11 May 1988, receiving his final recognition in an elaborate funeral organized by the KGB. A private buyer purchased the lion's share of Philby's papers, which were auctioned at Sothebys in July 1994. He was survived by his fourth wife.

Nigel Clive 

H. C. G. Matthew 

Sources  C. Andrew, Secret service: the making of the British intelligence community (1985) + C. Andrew and D. Dilks, eds., The missing dimension (1984) + N. Bethell, The great betrayal (1984) + J. Costello, Mask of treachery (1988) + J. Costello and O. Tsarev, Deadly illusions (1993) + P. Knightley, Philby, the life and views of the KGB masterspy (1988) + P. Seale and M. McConville, Philby, the long road to Moscow (1973) + H. Trevor-Roper, The Philby affair (1968) + K. Philby, My silent war (1968) + E. Philby, The spy I loved (1968) + G. Borovik, The Philby files (1994) + Y. Modin, My five Cambridge friends (1994)
Archives priv. coll.
Likenesses  photograph, 1955, Hult. Arch. · J. Bown, photograph, 1961, priv. coll. [see illus.] · J. Bown, photograph, repro. in The Independent (13 May 1988)




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