Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (January 1, 1912 – May 11, 1988) was a British traitor, who spied for the Soviet Union while an employee of Britain's intelligence service.

Philby belonged to the spy ring known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, although Cairncross's guilt has never conclusively been established and several others, including Sir Roger Hollis, former head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), have been suspected at one time or another to be the 'fifth man'. He gained his nickname "Kim" after the title character in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, about a young Indian boy who spies for the British in occupied India in the 19th century.

Born in Ambala , India, Philby was the son of Harry St. John Philby, the British diplomat, explorer, author, and Arabist who converted to Islam and who served at one time as an adviser to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia.

After leaving Westminster School in 1928, Philby went on to Trinity College, Cambridge. While a student there Philby became introduced to, and came to admire, the ideals of Communism. The Soviet Union did not exactly 'recruit' him as a spy — he volunteered. He asked one of his tutors, Maurice Dobb, how he could serve the Communist movement. Dobb passed him on (possibly not knowing what it would lead to) to a Communist front organisation, which passed him on to the Comintern underground in Vienna. The Soviet intelligence service itself (at that time known as the OGPU) recruited him on the strength of his work for the Comintern.

After working as a journalist Philby joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (the so-called M.I.6) in 1940, later becoming part of the SOE and coming into contact with OSS agents.

After the war Philby went first to Istanbul. He later became first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. He returned to Britain in 1950 and in 1951 managed to tip off Burgess and Maclean to an internal British intelligence probe: this warning allowed them time to escape to the Soviet Union. Suspicion of his involvement forced his retirement from the Secret Service and he went to work in Beirut. Only in 1963 (with the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn) did Western intelligence unmask him. Philby escaped to the Soviet Union before they could arrest him.

Escape

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, was slanting his articles with Arab sympathy. She said that he was always listening to his Soviet masters and that she knew that he had always worked for them. The comment was overheard by someone at the party and soon that information was relayed to the offices of the MI5 in London. Victor Rothschild, a prominent Jew who had high connections with 10 Downing Street and with MI5 interviewed Mrs. Solomon, who admitted that Philby had told her he was a spy and had tried to recruit her to the Communist cause but she would never testify against him. After a lot of arguing between MI5 and MI6, it was agreed that an MI6 man, Nicolas Elliott, would go to Beirut and confront Philby. It has not been established yet if there was an information leak, but there is evidence that in the last few months of 1963, Philby began to drink heavily and his behaviour became erratic, probably because the Soviets had alerted him to Golitsin, but the information provided by Solomon was a totally different matter. A top Soviet controller Yuri Modin who had served in the Soviet embassy in London had travelled to Beirut in December. The first thing that Philby said when he met Elliott was, "I was half expecting to see you." When told that there was fresh evidence against him, he immediately confessed without even asking what that was. It was agreed that there would be a further interrogation in the last week of January 1963, but he disappeared on January 23. Records reveal that a Soviet freighter had called to Beirut port exactly then. Later he surfaced in Moscow.

Philby died in 1988. The Soviet government gave him a hero's funeral.

Tim Powers based the book Declare on Philby's unusual life story, providing a supernatural explanation for his behavior ("Tradecraft meets Lovecraft"), and a Frederick Forsyth novel, The Fourth Protocol, features an elderly Philby advising a Soviet leader on a plot to influence a British election in 1985.

Philby was a close friend of the novelist Graham Greene, who reportedly left MI6 rather than participate in the unmasking of Philby. It has been suggested by some that Greene never really left the service, and continued to run Philby as a double agent.

Chronology of Philby's career

• 1919 Attended Aldro preparatory school in Eastbourne
• 1924 Went to Westminster School
• 1929 Entered Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of 17 to read history.
• 1930 Guy Burgess arrived at Trinity from Eton.
• 1931 Joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society CUSS . Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald defeated 27th October. Philby became a more ardent socialist. After obtaining only a third in his history exams he transferred to economics.
• 1932 Became treasurer of CUSS .
• 1933 Left Cambridge a convinced Communist with a degree in economics, then went to Vienna where Chancellor Dr Engelbert Dollfuss was preparing the first 'putsch' in February 1934. Philby became a Soviet agent.
• 1934 Clash between the Austrian government and socialists in Vienna. On Feb 24 Philby married Litzi Friedman; then in May, after the collapse of the socialist movement in Vienna, he returned with his wife to England. He began work as a sub-editor of a Liberal monthly review, and joined Burgess as a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. (Philby edited the fellowship's pro-Hitler magazine, supported by Nazi funds). To cover up his communist background he also made repeated visits to Berlin for talks with the German Propaganda Ministry and with von Ribbentrop's Foreign Office.
• 1937 In February Philby arrived in Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War from Franco's side. In July he became correspondent of The Times with Franco's forces.
• 1938 Awarded the 'Red Cross of Military Merit' by Franco personally.
• 1939 In July, left Spain and became war correspondent of The Times at the British Headquarters in Arras.
• 1940 In June, after the evacuation of British Forces from the European mainland, he returned to Britain. Recruited by the British Secret Service and attached to the SIS under Guy Burgess in Section D. Assigned to school for under-cover work, but later transferred to the teaching staff of a new school for general training in techniques of sabotage and subversion at Beaulieu, Hampshire.
• 1941 Transferred to SIS, Section V (Five). Philby took charge of the Iberian sub-section, responsible for British Intelligence in Spain and Portugal.
• 1942 Married his second wife Aileen Furse. OSS group under Norman Pearson arrived in London for liaison with British Secret Service. Philby's area of responsibility grew to include North African and Italian espionage under newly formed counter-intelligence units.
• 1943 Section V moved from St Albans to London, bringing Philby closer to the centers of power.
• 1944 Appointed head of Section IX, newly created to operate against communism and the Soviet Union.
• 1945 In September Soviet intelligence officer Konstantin Volkov based at the Soviet embassy in Ankara seriously threatened Philby's position by offering to defect and provide the names of two agents working in the Foreign Office and one in SIS (probably Philby). The offer was sent to Philby as head of the Section IX, Soviet counterintelligence. Soon afterwards, Volkov was kidnapped by Soviet agents and taken to the Lubyanka in Moscow for interrogation and execution.
• 1946 Took a field appointment - officially as First Secretary with the British embassy in Turkey, actually as head of the Turkish SIS station.
• 1949 Became SIS representative in Washington, as senior British Secret Service officer working in liaison with the CIA and the FBI. He sat in on a Special Policy Committee directing the ill-fated Anglo-US attempt to infiltrate anti-communist agents into Albania to topple the Enver Hoxha régime.
• 1950 Guy Burgess arrived in Washington on assignment as Second Secretary of the British Embassy, and Philby invited him to stay at his house.
• 1951 Philby learnt of the tightening net of suspicion surrounding Foreign Office diplomat and Soviet agent Donald Maclean, whose British embassy position at the end of the war had placed him on the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Energy as its British joint secretary. Burgess's alcoholism caused Ambassador Franks to remove him and he returned to England. On May 25, Burgess and Maclean disappeared from Britain, with help from Philby, having escaped via the Baltic to the Soviet Union. Philby summoned to London for interrogation and asked to resign from the Foreign Service.
• 1952 In the summer a secret trial took place in which Philby underwent questioning about his activities.
• 1955 The British Government published a 'White Paper' (report) on the Burgess-Maclean affair. On October 25, questions tabled in parliament asking about the 'third man', Philby. Prime Minster Harold Macmillan, stated that no evidence existed of Philby having betrayed the interests of Britain. Nevertheless, the Foreign Service dismissed him because of his association with Burgess.
• 1956 In September Philby went to Beirut as correspondent of The Observer and The Economist; most intriguingly he continued in SIS employment. But that year Dick White , who suspected Philby of working as a Soviet agent, became head of SIS.
• 1957 Aileen, Philby's second wife, died.
• 1958 Married Eleanor Brewer.
• 1962 George Blake unmasked. Philby then confirmed as an identified Soviet agent.
• 1963 January 23, Philby disappeared in Beirut. The Soviet Union announced that it has granted Philby political asylum in Moscow. On March 3, Mrs. Philby received a telegram from Philby postmarked Cairo, Egypt. On June 3 Izvestia located Philby with the Imam of Yemen. On July 1, the British Government admitted that Philby had worked as a Soviet agent before 1946 and identified him as the 'third man'.
• 1965 Awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the highest honours of the Soviet Union.

References

• My Silent War by Kim Philby, published by Macgibbon & Kee Ltd, London, 1968, or Granda Publishing, ISBN 0-586-02860-9. Introduction by Graham Greene
• The Philby Literature by Hayden Peake in The Private Life of KIM PHILBY The Moscow Years by Rufina Philby, Mikhail Lyubimov, and Hayden Peake. St. Ermin's Press, 1999.