In time, details emerged of their lives after they defected. Colonel Redl from the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WW1 probably was a more devastating spy. 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. In a 1981 lecture to the East German security service (the Stasi), Philby attributed the failure of the British Secret Service to unmask him as due in great part to the British class systemit was inconceivable that one "born into the ruling class of the British Empire" would be a traitorto the amateurish and incompetent nature of the organisation, and to so many in MI6 having so much to lose if he was proven to be a spy. Modrzhinskaya concluded that all were double agents, working essentially for the British. Their first three children, Josephine, John and Tommy Philby, were born between 1941 and 1944. In July 1951, he resigned from MI6, preempting his all-but-inevitable dismissal.[55]. His alcoholic mother, Aileen Furse, was his father's mistress before they were married in 1946 after he divorced his first wife. They met each other socially but soon fell out. Director Susan Johnson Writers Kara Holden (screenplay by) Caren Lissner (based on the novel by) Stars Bel Powley Nathan Lane Scott Keiji Takeda See production, box office & company info Watch on Netflix But as the months turned into years and no word came from him, she sank into depression at the realisation that she was now bringing up their children alone. In 1955, a botched investigation formally cleared him of spying for the Soviets but, shortly before being reinterviewed by British intelligence in 1963, Philby snr defected to Moscow. [58] This retraction came about when Philby was officially cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan on 7 November. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957.[91]. For some 30 years he was an adviser to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. You should have seen his face.". Harry Montague Philby was born in month 1857, at birth place, to Henry Adams Philby and Mary Philby (born Bridger). She was an object of both pity and fascination, and to get away from it all, she moved from their house on the Kent-Surrey border to Switzerland, with her mother. That summer, friends thought her distracted. [35] 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. [38] Nevertheless, Angleton's suspicions went unheard. [12][13] 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. She put the two boys into the International School in Geneva and finally explained to them what had happened to their father, reporting to her sister that their worst fear seems to be that I might vanish too. [89], In 1940, he began living with Aileen Furse in London. He is widely considered history's most successful double spy. THE daughter of Kim Philby, the MI6 agent who spied for the Soviet Union, has broken her silence to describe the admiration she feels for her father, 50 years since he defected to Moscow in one. The comments below have not been moderated, By
The KGB would stamp the documents "top secret" and begin their circulation. He valued his anonymity, but never changed his name from Philby. She flirted with other men and had affairs. Philbys defection sent ripples of shock across Western intelligence and is often described as one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War. 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. When the news broke in Britain that she, too, had defected, the Press rounded on Melinda, turning the pathetic and lonely figure theyd previously portrayed her as into a scheming deceiver. He did a lot with us., Philby was sent to Beirut in 1956 to work for The Observer, leaving his children in London, after being. 894646. Theirs had always been a stormy marriage, punctuated by bad behaviour on both sides and terrible rows. All was reasonably well between them until Kim Philby the master-spy who recruited him back in their Cambridge days himself defected in 1963. I questioned her about it but she would give me no details. Melinda put the bravest of faces on her situation when she wrote to her still grief-stricken mother that she understood the suffering she had caused. The gang of British spies who ended up in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s were employed in KGB training schools and international research institutes. And he kept his word to the end." He said, 'Why do old people live so badly here? She would be his silent witness for all the difficult years ahead. Melinda walked out on her husband, leaving the children with Donald, and moved in with Philby. However, when Elliott asked him to sign a written statement, he hesitated and requested a delay in the interrogation. The boys told a child they met on a beach that the photos he had taken could not be forwarded to them as we are going away and we dont know where we are going. It was a miracle. Harry St. John Philby, () 3.73 avg rating 11 ratings. [48], Burgess's presence was awkward for Philby, yet it was potentially dangerous for Philby to leave him unsupervised. 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. Chicago-born Melinda, whom he married in France in 1940, knew all along that Donald was a spy. His ashes were brought back to England, as he had requested, and buried in his parents grave after dark and by torchlight so that the press would not get wind of it. Turkish intelligence took them to a border crossing into Georgia but soon afterwards shots were heard. [11][pageneeded] 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. If one accepts Philbys propaganda one can repeat Philbys non-double agent claim. This turned out to be identical with Barclay's dispatch, convincing the NKVD that Philby had seen the full Barclay report. Dora Patricia Cardew Philby. Kim Philby, , . 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[21] of Reuters. Clear rating. [3], On the evening of 23 January 1963, Philby vanished from Beirut, failing to meet his wife for a dinner party at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, First Secretary at the British Embassy. And in 1951, as his spying activities unravelled and his Soviet masters told him to defect, she agreed the best course of action was for him to be ex-filtrated rather than try to brazen out the accusations of treachery that were soon to be levelled at him. However, she denies that Philby ever regretted defecting to the Soviet Union, adding that he never talked of going home to Britain. On 25 October 1955, following revelations in The New York Times, Labour MP Marcus Lipton used parliamentary privilege to ask Prime Minister Anthony Eden if he was determined "to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby"[57] This was reported in the British press, leading Philby to threaten legal action against Lipton if he repeated his accusations outside Parliament. While working as a senior member of British intelligence, he spied on behalf of the Soviet NKVD and KGB from the early 1930s until his defection. Another effort was made using a Turkish gulet for a seaborne landing, but it never left port. Alamy. As he states in his autobiography, he . This statement was underlined twice in red and marked with two question marks, clearly indicating their 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. But, after a silence of nearly five years, here was the first actual sighting and confirmation that the runaways were alive. Rate this book.
But unlike his notorious father, who was hailed a hero in the Soviet Union and buried with full honours, Philby jnr led a low-profile life, and ran his own successful joinery business from a workshop near King's Cross in north London. Philby planned to infiltrate five or six groups of migrs into Soviet Armenia or Soviet Georgia, but efforts among the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits. [6] Following in the footsteps of his father, Philby continued to Westminster School, which he left in 1928 at the age of 16. Harry St John Bridger Philby CIE (born 3 April 1885, Badulla, British Ceylon - 30 September 1960, Beirut, Lebanon), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah ( ), his Arabic name, was an Arabist, explorer, writer, and British colonial office intelligence officer. He also delivered clothes and money to refugees. Eleanor found Melinda amusing but nervous and highly strung and yearning for the luxuries of Western capitalism. To the frequent question, ''No relation, I hope? Pierre-Charles Path est un journaliste franais n le 9 juillet 1910 Boulogne-sur-Mer et mort le 14 novembre 1997 1 Villejuif. Known as Kim to his friends, Philby secretly defected to the USSR from his home in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1963. This mistake made it possible to break the normally impregnable code. He was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934. Philby replied that none had been sent and that none was undergoing training at that time. This role allowed him to conduct sabotage and instruct agents on how to properly conduct sabotage. By the time he arrived in Turkey, three weeks later, Volkov had been removed to Moscow. "[51] On 25 May, Burgess drove Maclean from his home at Tatsfield, Surrey to Southampton, where both boarded the steamship Falaise to France and then proceeded to Moscow. From April 1950, Maclean had been the prime suspect in the investigation into the Embassy leak. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union and those interests required that these men were defeated. Mary was born circa 1824, in London, England. 23. Journalist Ben Macintyre, author of several works on espionage, speculated that MI6 might have left open the opportunity for Philby to flee to Moscow to avoid an embarrassing public trial. A similar lapse occurred with a report from the Imperial Japanese Embassy in Moscow sent to Tokyo. He would say we and our when speaking of the Soviet Union and defended his adopted countrys brutal crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 an event that disgusted many Left-wing supporters back in the UK. Macleans outward calm in the face of exile was greatly bolstered by his wifes support. He and Pukhova married in 1971, when he was 59 and she was 38. Donald Maclean, although arrogant and someone who liked a drink too, was regarded as more convivial. Could they have overlooked Philby's Communist wife?" [11][pageneeded] 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. [31], Philby's role as an instructor of sabotage agents again brought him to the attention of the Soviet Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU). In 1968, she returned to Maclean. Harry St John Philby on his 1917 trek across the Arabian Peninsula, which he recorded in his 1922 book 'Heart of Arabia'. He trained Albanian commandossome of whom were former Nazi collaboratorsin Libya or Malta. Working from genuine unclassified and public CIA or US State Department documents, Philby inserted "sinister" paragraphs regarding US plans. Born in British India, Philby was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. [46], In January 1950, on evidence provided by the Venona intercepts, Soviet atomic spy Klaus Fuchs was arrested. On the 50th anniversary of Philbys defection to Moscow, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph carried an article with excerpts of interviews with one of Philbys sons, Dudley Thomas Philby, and his Russian widow, Rufina Pukhova Philby. Please, The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. Volkov's defection had been discussed with the British Embassy in Ankara on telephones which turned out to have been tapped by Soviet intelligence. He claimed he made the admission to her to excuse his lateness for their meetings when he was busy handling documents and rendezvousing with his Soviet handler. 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. He got drunk and roamed Kuybyshev looking for action, on one occasion having his teeth knocked out in a brawl. 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. Guarded night and day by KGB troops, and rigorously de-briefed to make sure they were not double agents, to all intents and purposes they were under house arrest. Some could never quite come to terms that he was a traitor. "[69] Prompted by Elliott's accusations, Philby confirmed the charges of espionage and described his intelligence activities on behalf of the Soviets. Shortly after the extent of Philby's penetration was publicised in October. In 1971, Philby married Rufina Pukhova, a Russo-Polish woman 20 years his junior, with whom he lived until his death in 1988. Their fifth child, Harry George, was born in 1950. And this was the line Melinda presented to MI5 after his defection with fellow mole Guy Burgess: she had been every bit as duped as theyd been. In the capital, he became a magazine correspondent, then a teacher and analyst in a research institute for foreign and economic affairs. Matthew Tomkinson / Heart of Arabia Expedition. He told The Telegraph that he personally did not agree with his fathers political views, but added: he was what he was, what could I do?. Aileen Philby had suffered since childhood from psychological problems which caused her to inflict injuries upon herself. Jun 27, 2019. Her mood changed, though, with Stalins death in March 1953 and the prospect that the Soviet Union might now become a more open place. She was later sent to a Swiss clinic for treatment. Maclean seemed totally at one with Soviet ways and believed to his death that the USSR and its new society has a much better prospect than the old of overcoming the major ills and injustices of our civilisation. The next day she notified the British Consul in Geneva. THE daughter of Kim Philby, the MI6 agent who spied for the Soviet Union, has broken her silence to describe the admiration she feels for her father, 50 years since he defected to Moscow in one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War. The minister told the House of Commons, "I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called 'Third Man', if indeed there was one. We searched every corner until Kim suddenly struck himself on the head with his hand, went to a cupboard and brought back the boot. Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby, fdd 1 januari 1912 i Ambala, Provinsen Punjab, Brittiska Indien, dd 11 maj 1988 i Moskva, Sovjetunionen, var en brittisk stor spion och dubbelagent samt verste inom KGB . Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview. [37], In February 1934, Philby married Litzi Friedmann, an Austrian Jewish communist whom he had met in Vienna. He was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934. Stewart Menzies, head of SIS, disliked the idea, which was promoted by former SOE men now in SIS. Because hed told her from the very start. Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. To order a copy for 15, visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. I dont accept Philbys excuses. As for Melinda the central figure in the circle of loyalty and secrecy, desertion and reconciliation, love and solitariness that was the human drama of Donald Macleans life she lived well into her 90s before dying in New York in 2010, silent to the end about her years with one of Britains most infamous traitors. [67] When Nicholas Elliott met Philby in late 1962, the first time since Golitsyn's defection, he found Philby too drunk to stand and with a bandaged head; he had fallen repeatedly and cracked his skull on a bathroom radiator, requiring stitches. During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one-time pad to transmit intelligence traffic. 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. He was 65. [66] She recalled returning home to Beirut from a sight-seeing trip in Jordan to find Philby "hopelessly drunk and incoherent with grief on the terrace of the flat," mourning the death of a little pet fox which had fallen from the balcony. She asked, "Could the SIS really be such fools they failed to notice suitcase-loads of papers leaving the office? burial place . He graduated in 1933 with a 2:1 degree in Economics. 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