This entailed responsibility for a network of undercover operatives in several cities such as Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier. Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files, 1994, published by Little, Brown & Company Limited, Canada, Kim Philby, memorandum in Security Service Archives (1963), David Smiley, "Albanian Assignment", foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor – Chatto & Windus – London – 1984 (, Rufina Philby, Mikhail Lyubimov and Hayden Peake (1999). Burgess had to get to London to warn Maclean, who was under surveillance. 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. In early May 1951, Burgess got three speeding tickets in a single day – then pleaded diplomatic immunity, causing an official complaint to be made to the British Ambassador. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.[2]. "[17], Philby continued to live in the United Kingdom with his wife for several years. When Jane Archer (who had interviewed Krivitsky) was appointed to Philby's section he moved her off investigatory work in case she became aware of his past. Barclay reported the complaint to London. Spouse(s) Litzi Friedmann Aileen Furse Eleanor Brewer Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova: Parent(s) St John Philby, Dora Philby: Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer who worked as a spy for the Soviet Union, before defecting in 1963. [86] Aileen suffered from psychiatric problems, which grew more severe during the period of poverty and suspicion following the flight of Burgess and Maclean. The spy who loved me: Charlotte Philby returns to Moscow in search of her grandfather Kim Philby 332642.bin The shiny black 4x4 rumbles slowly through the graveyard. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957.[87]. In 1956, Philby began an affair with Eleanor Brewer, the wife of The New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer. Kim Philby was a British spy who worked for MI6. Shortly afterward, Philby was moved to the job as chief SIS representative in Washington, D.C., with his family. The intercepted messages revealed that the British Embassy source (identified as "Homer") travelled to New York City to meet his Soviet contact twice a week. In 1936 he began working at a trade magazine, the Anglo-Russian Trade Gazette, as editor. [10][page needed] On a short trip back from Spain, Philby tried to recruit Flora Solomon as a Soviet agent; she was the daughter of a Russian banker and gold dealer, a relative of the Rothschilds, and wife of a London stockbroker. In 1946, Philby finally arranged a formal divorce from Litzi. Angleton remained suspicious of Philby, but lunched with him every week in Washington. Stewart Menzies, head of SIS, disliked the idea, which was promoted by former SOE men now in SIS. 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[20] of Reuters. [11][12] Philby had come to the Soviets' notice earlier that year in Vienna, where he had been involved in demonstrations against the government of Engelbert Dollfuss. It has since been suggested that the whole confrontation with Elliott had been a charade to convince the KGB that Philby had to be brought back to Moscow, where he could serve as a British penetration agent of Moscow Centre. [3] St John was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and later a civil servant in Mesopotamia and advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia. Philby had been briefed on the situation shortly before reaching Washington in 1949; it was clear to Philby that the agent was Donald Maclean, who worked in the British Embassy at the time and whose wife, Melinda, lived in New York. Volkov had insisted that all written communications about him take place by diplomatic bag rather than by telegraph, causing […] Even after Philby's departure from MI6, speculation regarding his possible Soviet affiliations continued. Eleanor and Kim Philby spent a great deal of time with Donald Maclean and his wife, Melinda Maclean. When visiting Paris after the war, he was shocked to discover that the address that he used for Mlle Dupont was that of the Soviet Embassy. For the Soviets, Philby was an invaluable asset, ensuring the correct use of idiomatic and diplomatic English phrases in their disinformation efforts.[82]. Registered in England No. He looked out at the world with alert. However, a more serious threat to Philby's position had come to light. [4], Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim,[3] Philby attended Aldro preparatory school, an all-boys school located in Shackleford near Godalming in Surrey, United Kingdom. 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. 2012. Kim Philby : biography 1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988 Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988. In the Soviet Union, Kim Philby fell in love with Rufina Pukhova, who worked at a Moscow research institute, and they married. The woman who exposed Britain’s most infamous double-agent. Philby had to help discover the identity of "Homer", but also wished to protect Maclean. [58] Another meeting was scheduled to take place in the last week of January. On the strength of his knowledge and experience of Franco's Spain, Philby was put in charge of the subsection which dealt with Spain and Portugal. [8][page needed]. His public position was that of First Secretary at the British Consulate; in reality, his intelligence work required overseeing British agents and working with the Turkish security services.[40]. Kim Philby’s closest friend, Nicholas Elliott, was always struck by the “loyalty and affection” he inspired in women. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Please, The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. He was also responsible for tipping off two other spies under suspicion of espionage, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, both of whom subsequently fled to Moscow in May 1951. 149", "Up on the Catwalk Lyrics – Simple Minds", 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, 12th June 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kim_Philby&oldid=999325306, British intelligence personnel who defected to the Soviet Union, Officers of the Order of the British Empire, People educated at Westminster School, London, People stripped of a British Commonwealth honour, Recipients of the Order of Friendship of Peoples, Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner, World War II spies for the United Kingdom, People granted political asylum in the Soviet Union, Articles having same image on Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from June 2020, Articles needing additional references from June 2020, All articles needing additional references, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2019, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2013, Articles with trivia sections from October 2019, Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Belgian comic authors Olivier Neuray and Valerie Lemaire wrote a series of three historical comics entitled "Les Cinq de Cambridge" involving Kim Philby. After leaving Cambridge, Philby worked as a journalist and covered the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of France. [39], In February 1947, Philby was appointed head of British intelligence for Turkey, and posted to Istanbul with his second wife, Aileen, and their family. Following Eleanor's divorce, the couple married[58] in January 1959. The rendezvous took place in Regents Park. The KGB would stamp the documents “top secret” and begin their circulation. The film recounts Philby's love affair and marriage to Eleanor Brewer during his time in Beirut, and his eventual defection to the Soviet Union in late January 1963, though the characters based on Philby and Brewer have different names. "[46], Burgess's presence was problematic for Philby, yet it was potentially dangerous for Philby to leave him unsupervised. Litzi lived in Paris before returning to London for the duration of the war; she ultimately settled in East Germany. This role allowed him to conduct sabotage and instruct agents on how to properly conduct sabotage. 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. Another effort was made using a Turkish gulet for a seaborne landing, but it never left port. 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. Philby claimed to have overheard discussion of this by chance and sent a report to his controller. She noted that they produced an extraordinary wealth of information on German war plans but next to nothing on the repeated question of British penetration of Soviet intelligence in either London or Moscow. Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988)[1] was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. "[14], Philby recommended to Deutsch several of his Cambridge contemporaries, including Donald Maclean, who at the time was working in the Foreign Office,[15] as well as Guy Burgess, despite his personal reservations about Burgess's erratic personality. But efforts among the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits. In November 1964, after a visit to the United States, she returned, intending to settle permanently. He was publicly exonerated in 1955, after which he resumed his career as both a journalist and a spy for SIS in Beirut. They travelled together in Spain through August 1939. [45] His dissolution had a troubling effect on Philby; the morning after a particularly disastrous and drunken party, a guest returning to collect his car heard voices upstairs and found "Kim and Guy in the bedroom drinking champagne. During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one-time pad to transmit intelligence traffic. Kim Philby : biography 1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988 Philby’s role might have compromised his position. [13] Philby later recalled: Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a "man of decisive importance". [16], In London, Philby began a career as a journalist. 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. By Jeremy Salt. I discovered much later from a photograph in MI5 files that the name he went by was Arnold Deutsch. Born in Ambala, Punjab, British India, Philby was the son of Dora Johnston and St John Philby, an author, Arabist and explorer. He is survived by his son Jack and daughter-in-law, Eliza Philby, who lives in the United States. SON OF MASTER SPY. 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