Kim Philby Part I

 

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during the Second World War and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.

Born in British India, Philby was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934. After leaving Cambridge, Philby worked as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of France. In 1940 he began working for the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). By the end of the Second World War he had become a high-ranking member. In 1949 Philby was appointed first secretary to the British Embassy in Washington and served as chief British liaison with American intelligence agencies. During his career as an intelligence officer, he passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviet Union, including the Albanian Subversion, a scheme to overthrow the pro-Soviet government of Communist Albania.

Philby was suspected of tipping off two other spies under suspicion of Soviet espionage, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, both of whom subsequently fled to Moscow in May 1951. Under suspicion himself, Philby resigned from MI6 in July 1951 but was publicly exonerated by then-Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955. He resumed his career as both a journalist and a spy for MI6 in Beirut, but was forced to defect to Moscow after finally being unmasked as a Soviet agent in 1963. Philby lived in Moscow until his death in 1988.

Early life

Kim Philby was born in Ambala, Punjab, British India, to author and explorer St John Philby and his wife, Dora Johnston. A member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) at the time of Philby's birth, St John later became a civil servant in Mesopotamia and advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia.

Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, Philby attended Aldro preparatory school, an all-boys school located in Shackleford, Surrey. In his early teens, he spent some time with the Bedouin in the Arabian desert] Following in the footsteps of his father, Philby continued to Westminster School, which he left in 1928 at the age of 16. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history and economics. He graduated in 1933 with a 2:1 degree in Economics.

At Cambridge, Philby exhibited a "leaning towards communism", in the words of his father, who went on to write: "The only serious question is whether Kim definitely intended to be disloyal to the government while in its service." One of the first things Philby did in Cambridge was joining the Cambridge University Socialist Society, attending their meetings but taking little part in their proceedings. However, following the Labour Party's defeat in the 1931 general election, he took a more active role in the society and served as its treasurer between 1932 and 1933. Upon his graduation, Maurice Dobb, a tutor in economics at Trinity, introduced Philby to the World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, an organization based in Paris, which attempted to aid victims of Nazi Germany and provide education on oppositions to fascism. The organization was one of several fronts operated by German communist Willi Münzenberg, a member of the Reichstag who had fled to France in 1933.

Communism and recruitment

While working to aid German refugees in Vienna, Philby met Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann), a young Austrian communist of Hungarian Jewish origins. 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. I replied £100, which I hoped would last me about a year in Vienna. She made some calculations and announced, "That will leave you an excess of £25. You can give that to the International Organisation for Aid for Revolutionaries. We need it desperately." I liked her determination.

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. He also delivered clothes and money to refugees. Following the Austrofascist victory in the Austrian Civil War, Philby and Friedmann married in February 1934, enabling her to escape to the United Kingdom with him two months later.

It is possible that it was a Viennese-born friend of Friedmann's in London, Edith Tudor Hart–herself, at this time, a Soviet agent–who first approached Philby about the possibility of working for Soviet intelligence. In early 1934 Arnold Deutsch, another Soviet agent, was sent to University College London under the cover of a research appointment, but in reality had been assigned to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities. 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. In June 1934, Deutsch recruited Philby to the Soviet intelligence services. Philby later recalled:

Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a "man of decisive importance". I questioned her about it but she would give me no details. The rendezvous took place in Regents Park. The man described himself as Otto. I discovered much later from a photograph in MI5 files that the name he went by was Arnold Deutsch. I think that he was of Czech origin; about 5 ft 7in, stout, with blue eyes and light curly hair. Though a convinced Communist, he had a strong humanistic streak. He hated London, adored Paris, and spoke of it with deeply loving affection. He was a man of considerable cultural background."

Philby recommended to Deutsch several of his Cambridge contemporaries, including Donald Maclean, who at the time was working in the Foreign Office, as well as Guy Burgess, despite his personal reservations about Burgess' erratic personality.

Journalism

In London, Philby began a career as a journalist. 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." Meanwhile, Philby and Friedmann separated. They remained friends for many years following their separation and divorced only in 1946, following the end of the Second World War. When the Germans threatened to overrun Paris in 1940, where she was then living at this time, Philby arranged for Friedmann's escape to Britain.

In 1936, Philby began working at a failing trade magazine, the Anglo-Russian Trade Gazette, as editor. 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. He became a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, an organization aiming at rebuilding and supporting a friendly relationship between Germany and the United Kingdom. The Anglo-German Fellowship, at this time, was supported both by the British and German governments, and Philby made many trips to Berlin.

In February 1937, Philby travelled to Spain, then embroiled in a bloody civil war triggered by the coup d'état of Falangist forces under General Francisco Franco against the government of President Manuel Azaña. 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 in Seville. He also began working for both the Soviet and British intelligence, which usually consisted of posting letters in a crude code to a fictitious girlfriend, Mlle Dupont in Paris, for the Soviets. He used a simpler system for MI6, delivering post at Hendaye, France, for the British embassy in Paris. 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. His controller in Paris, a Latvian national named Ozolin-Haskins (code name Pierre), was shot in Moscow in 1937 during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. His successor, Boris Bazarov, suffered the same fate two years later.

Both the British and the Soviets were interested in analyzing the combat performance of the new Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes and Panzer I and Panzer II tanks deployed with Falangist forces in Spain. Philby told the British, after a direct question to Franco, that German troops would never be permitted to cross Spain to attack Gibraltar. Philby's Soviet controller at the time, Theodore Maly, reported in April 1937 to the NKVD that he had personally briefed Philby on the need "to discover the system of guarding Franco and his entourage". Maly was one of the Soviet Union's most powerful and influential illegal controllers and recruiters. With the goal of potentially arranging Franco's assassination, Philby was instructed to report on vulnerable points in Franco's security and recommend ways to gain access to him and his staff. 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."

In December 1937, during the Battle of Teruel, a Republican shell hit just in front of the car in which Philby was traveling along with correspondents Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press, Bradish Johnson of Newsweek and Ernest Sheepshanks of Reuters. Johnson was killed outright, and Neil and Sheepshanks soon died of their injuries. Philby suffered only a minor head wound. As a result of this accident, Philby, who was well-liked by the Nationalist forces whose victories he trumpeted, was awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit by Franco on 2 March 1938. Philby found that the award proved helpful in obtaining access to fascist circles:

...there had been a lot of criticism of British journalists from Franco officers who seemed to think that the British in general must be a lot of Communists because so many were fighting with the International Brigades. After I had been wounded and decorated by Franco himself, I became known as 'the English-decorated-by-Franco' and all sorts of doors opened to me.

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". He testified before the Dies Committee (later to become the House Un-American Activities Committee) regarding Soviet espionage within the US. In 1940 he was interviewed by MI5 officers in London, led by Jane Archer. Krivitsky claimed that two Soviet intelligence agents had penetrated the Foreign Office and that a third Soviet intelligence agent had worked as a journalist for a British newspaper in Spain. No connection with Philby was made at the time, and Krivitsky was found shot in a Washington hotel room the following year.

Alexander Orlov (born Lev Feldbin; code-name Swede), Philby's controller in Madrid, who had once met him in France, also defected. To protect his family, still living in the Soviet Union, Orlov said nothing about Philby, an agreement Stalin respected. 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. At the same time, Burgess was trying to get her into MI6. But the resident (Russian term for spymaster) in France, probably Pierre at this time, suggested to Moscow that he suspected Philby's motives. Solomon introduced Philby to the woman who would become Philby's second wife, Aileen Furse. Solomon went to work for the British retailer Marks & Spencer.

British intelligence career

World War II

In July 1939, Philby returned to The Times office in London. When Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, Philby's contact with his Soviet controllers was lost and he failed to attend the meetings that were necessary for his work. During the Phoney War from September 1939 until the Dunkirk evacuation, Philby worked as The Times' first-hand correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force headquarters. After being evacuated from Boulogne on 21 May, he returned to France in mid-June and began representing The Daily Telegraph in addition to The Times. He briefly reported from Cherbourg and Brest, sailing for Plymouth less than 24 hours before France surrendered to Germany in June 1940.

In 1940, on the recommendation of Burgess, Philby joined MI6's Section D, a secret organisation charged with investigating how enemies might be attacked through non-military means. Philby and Burgess ran a training course for would-be saboteurs at Brickendonbury Manor in Hertfordshire. His time at Section D, however, was short-lived; the "tiny, ineffective, and slightly comic" section was soon absorbed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the summer of 1940. Burgess was arrested in September for drunken driving and was subsequently fired, while Philby was appointed as an instructor on clandestine propaganda at the SOE's finishing school for agents at the Estate of Lord Montagu in Beaulieu, Hampshire.

Philby's role as an instructor of sabotage agents again brought him to the attention of the Soviet Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU). This role allowed him to conduct sabotage and instruct agents on how to properly conduct sabotage. The new London resident, Ivan Chichayev (code-name Vadim), re-established contact and asked for a list of British agents being trained to enter the Soviet Union. Philby replied that none had been sent and that none was undergoing training at that time. This statement was underlined twice in red and marked with two question marks, clearly indicating confusion and questioning of this, by disbelieving staff at Moscow Central in the Lubyanka, according to Genrikh Borovik, who saw the telegrams much later in the KGB archives.

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 Adolf Hitler had urged. The first was ignored as a provocation, but the second, when confirmed by the Russo-German journalist and spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo, contributed to Stalin's decision to begin transporting troops from the Far East in time for the counteroffensive around Moscow.

By September 1941, Philby began working for Section Five of MI6, a section responsible for offensive counter-intelligence. On the strength of his knowledge and experience of Franco's Spain, he was put in charge of the subsection that dealt with Spain and Portugal. This entailed responsibility for a network of undercover operatives in several cities such as Madrid, Gibraltar, Lisbon and Tangier. At this time, the German Abwehr was active in Spain, particularly around the British naval base of Gibraltar, which its agents hoped to watch with many detection stations to track Allied supply ships in the Western Mediterranean. Thanks to British counter-intelligence efforts, of which Philby's Iberian subsection formed a significant part, the project (Abwehr code-name Bodden) never came to fruition.

During 1942–43, Philby's responsibilities were then expanded to include North Africa and Italy, and he was made the deputy head of Section Five under Major Felix Cowgill, an army officer seconded to SIS. 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. In late 1944 Philby, on instructions from his Soviet handler, maneuvered through the system successfully to replace Cowgill as head of Section Nine. Charles Arnold-Baker, an officer of German birth (born Wolfgang von Blumenthal) working for Richard Gatty in Belgium and later transferred to the Norwegian/Swedish border, voiced many suspicions of Philby and his intentions but was repeatedly ignored.

While working in Section Five, Philby had become acquainted with James Jesus Angleton, a young American counter-intelligence officer working in liaison with SIS in London. Angleton, later chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Counterintelligence Staff, became suspicious of Philby when he failed to pass on information relating to a British agent executed by the Gestapo in Germany. It later emerged that the agent—known as Schmidt—had also worked as an informant for the Rote Kapelle organisation, which sent information to both London and Moscow. Nevertheless, Angleton's suspicions went unheard.

In late summer 1943, the SIS provided the GRU an official report on the activities of German agents in Bulgaria and Romania, soon to be liberated by the Soviet Union. The NKVD complained to Cecil Barclay, the SIS representative in Moscow, that information had been withheld. Barclay reported the complaint to London. Philby claimed to have overheard discussion of this by chance and sent a report to his controller. This turned out to be identical with Barclay's dispatch, convincing the NKVD that Philby had seen the full Barclay report. A similar lapse occurred with a report from the Japanese embassy in Moscow sent to Tokyo. The NKVD received the same report from Sorge but with an extra paragraph claiming that Hitler might seek a separate peace with the Soviet Union. These lapses by Philby aroused intense suspicion in Moscow.

Elena Modrzhinskaya at GUGB headquarters in Moscow assessed all material from the Cambridge Five. 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. Philby had repeated his claim that there were no such agents. She asked, "Could the SIS really be such fools they failed to notice suitcase-loads of papers leaving the office? Could they have overlooked Philby's Communist wife?" Modrzhinskaya concluded that all were double agents, working essentially for the British.

A more serious incident occurred in August 1945, when Konstantin Volkov, an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain for himself and his wife. For a large sum of money, Volkov offered the names of three Soviet agents inside Britain, two of whom worked in the Foreign Office and a third who worked in counterintelligence in London. Philby was given the task of dealing with Volkov by British intelligence. He warned the Soviets of the attempted defection and travelled to Istanbul—ostensibly to handle the matter on behalf of SIS but, in reality, to ensure that Volkov had been neutralized. By the time he arrived in Turkey, three weeks later, Volkov had been removed to Moscow.

The intervention of Philby in the affair and the subsequent capture of Volkov by the Soviets might have seriously compromised Philby's position. Volkov's defection had been discussed with the British embassy in Ankara on telephones which turned out to have been tapped by Soviet intelligence. 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. Philby was thus able to evade blame and detection.

A month later Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in Ottawa, took political asylum in Canada and gave the Royal Canadian Mounted Police names of agents operating within the British Empire that were known to him. 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. He later wrote "she had got a tantalizing scrap of information about a young English journalist whom the Soviet intelligence had sent to Spain during the Civil War. And here she was plunked down in my midst!"

Years after the war, Sir Hardy Amies, who had served as an intelligence officer, recalled that Philby was in his mess and on being asked what the infamous spy was like, Hardy quipped, "He was always trying to get information out of me—most significantly the name of my tailor". Philby, "employed in a Department of the Foreign Office", was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946.

Istanbul

In February 1947, Philby was appointed head of British intelligence for Turkey and posted to Istanbul with his second wife, Aileen, and their family. 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.

Philby planned to infiltrate five or six groups of émigrés into Soviet Armenia or Soviet Georgia, but efforts among the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits. Turkish intelligence took them to a border crossing into Georgia but soon afterwards shots were heard. Another effort was made using a Turkish gulet for a seaborne landing, but it never left port. Philby was implicated in a similar campaign in Communist Albania. Colonel David Smiley, an aristocratic Guards officer who had helped Enver Hoxha and his communist guerillas to liberate Albania, now prepared to remove Hoxha. He trained Albanian commandos—some of whom were former Nazi collaborators—in Libya or Malta. From 1947, they infiltrated the southern mountains to build support for former King Zog.

The first three missions, overland from Greece, were trouble-free. Larger numbers were landed by sea and air under Operation Valuable, which continued until 1951, increasingly under the influence of the newly formed CIA. Stewart Menzies, head of SIS, disliked the idea, which was promoted by former SOE men now in SIS. Most infiltrators were caught by the Sigurimi, the Albanian Security Service. Clearly there had been leaks and Philby was later suspected as one of the leakers. 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." Philby later wrote of his attitude towards the operation in Albania:

The agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on murder, sabotage and assassination ... They knew the risks they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union and those interests required that these men were defeated. To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.

Philby's wife had suffered from psychological problems since childhood which caused her to inflict injuries upon herself. In 1948, troubled by Philby's heavy drinking and frequent depressions and his life in Istanbul, she experienced a breakdown, staging an accident and injecting herself with urine and insulin to cause skin disfigurations. She was sent to a clinic in Switzerland to recover. Upon her return to Istanbul in late 1948, she was badly burned in an incident with a charcoal stove and returned to Switzerland. Shortly afterward, Philby was moved to the job as Chief SIS representative in Washington, with his family.