Espionage No Regrets Kim Philby: 1912-1988

When he disappeared from Beirut in January 1963, after telling his wife he would meet her at a diplomatic dinner party that evening, Kim Philby was a relatively obscure British journalist. During the quarter-century between his defection to the Soviet Union, for which he had been spying since the 1930s, and his death last week at 76 of undisclosed causes, Philby’s legend grew to mythic proportions. Still active in the KGB, where he rose to the rank of general, Philby wrote a cryptic 1968 memoir, My Silent War, and gave only a handful of interviews. Yet his life and those of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two fellow British double agents whom he helped escape in 1951, inspired countless plays, films, novels and biographies. In spy fiction if not reality, Philby’s perfidy seems to have been pivotal in a mood swing from patriotic derring-do to dour pessimism.

What remains beyond question is that Philby nullified much British and American espionage during and after World War II, spilling all to his Soviet masters, first as head of the Soviet desk of British counterintelligence and then, from 1949 to 1951, as Washington liaison with the CIA. He remorselessly sent to their deaths hundreds of agents, including ethnic Albanians who in the early 1950s were smuggled into Albania, with covert U.S. and British backing, to foment revolution. Says former CIA Director Richard Helms: “Philby did a lot of damage. He was not only a traitor to his country but a traitor to the free world.”

His tipping off Burgess and Maclean, an act that was detected, cost Philby a shot at the top job in the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, and could have cost him a good deal more. Yet despite two secret trials and a 1955 accusation on the floor of Parliament — an incident that ironically led Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan to proclaim him cleared of disloyalty — Philby was allowed to go on working for MI6. Until he defected, he free- lanced for the service, which also helped him find employment as a journalist. In an interview last January with British Journalist Phillip Knightley, Philby claimed that his departure was engineered by Britain “because the last thing the British government wanted at that time was me in London, a security scandal and a sensational trial.” He even retained the honor he had been awarded in 1946 — Order of the British Empire — for two years after fleeing to Moscow, and his collaborator Anthony Blunt remained the Queen’s adviser on art for more than a decade after admitting to treason.

Philby, born Harold Adrian Russell, was the only son of St. John Philby, a British civil servant who sided with the colonies rather than the empire and became an adviser to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Harold was born in India, and in childhood acquired the lasting nickname of Kim, the courageous boy spy in Rudyard Kipling’s tale. He attended his father’s schools, Westminster and Cambridge. Philby met Burgess, Maclean and Blunt at Cambridge but insisted that they were not recruited there. In Vienna, where he lived after graduation, he joined a Communist cell and was assigned lifetime duties: to return to Britain and penetrate its intelligence service.

Given his breeding and education, and the clubby atmosphere of British intelligence at the time, Philby’s youthful political excesses were overlooked, and by 1940, at 28, he was established as an agent. Colleagues disregarded his drinking and womanizing (he married four times and had several mistresses, including Maclean’s wife Melinda), and often spoke of his intelligence and charm. But as Philby explained when he first emerged from silence in 1967, he felt no love for his native land. “To betray you must first belong,” he said. “I never belonged.”

Rarely seen in public in Moscow, Philby enjoyed all the privileges of a favored bureaucrat, including an apartment in the capital and a dacha, and never once regretted his decision. “I want to be buried in the Soviet Union, in this country which I have considered to be my own since the 1930s,” he said. Last week he got his wish, after a funeral with full military honors.