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Kim Philby
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Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby (OBE: 1946-1965), (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988) was a high-ranking member of British intelligence. A socialist, he served as an NKVD and KGB operative.
In 1963, Philby was revealed as a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing classified information to the Soviet Union.
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Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby (OBE: 1946-1965), (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988) was a high-ranking member of British intelligence. A socialist, he served as an NKVD and KGB operative.
In 1963, Philby was revealed as a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing classified information to the Soviet Union. His activities were moderated only by Stalin's paranoia that Philby was a triple agent.
Early life
Born in Ambala, Punjab, India, Philby was the son of Harry St. John Philby, a British Army officer, diplomat, explorer, author, and Orientalist who converted to Islam and was advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia. He was nicknamed after the protagonist in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim about a young Irish Indian boy who spies for the British in India during the 19th century. He was educated at Aldro prep school and Westminster School which he left in 1928 at the age of 16. Philby studied history and economics at Trinity College, Cambridge where he was introduced to and became an admirer of Communism. It has been suggested that his father, while not a spy himself, was opposed to the British establishment and was thus Kim Philby's inspiration and probable mentor. The elder Philby died in 1960.
Philby asked one of his tutors, Maurice Dobb, how he could serve the Communist movement. Dobb referred him to a Communist front organisation which in turn passed Philby to the Comintern underground in Vienna, Austria. The front organisation was the World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism in Paris. The World Federation was one of innumerable fronts operated by the German Communist Willi Münzenberg, who was a leading Soviet agent in the West.
Espionage activities
The Soviet intelligence service itself (then the OGPU) recruited Philby on the strength of his work for the Comintern. His case officers included Arnold Deutsch (codename OTTO), Theodore Maly (codename MAN), and Alexander Orlov (codename SWEDE). All of them suffered under Stalin's purges.
In 1933, Kim Philby went to Vienna to aid refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany. There he met Litzi Friedman, a Jewish Communist with whom he entered into a marriage of convenience, bringing her to Britain in order to save her from persecution in Austria. The marriage did not outlast the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, as ordered by Moscow, Philby began cultivating a pro-fascist persona, joining the Anglo-German Fellowship and editing its pro-Hitler magazine.
Spain
On 3 February 1937 Philby traveled to Seville, Spain via Lisbon with Litzi Friedman, who was to remain in Portugal as an emergency communication link until Philby reached Seville, where he began work as a freelance journalist and a Soviet agent, ordered to report on the security arrangements at Francisco Franco's headquarters. He was arrested as a suspicious alien while attending a bullfight at Córdoba, but was merely warned about unauthorized traveling and sent back to Seville. He had disposed of his codebook before it was discovered and requested a new one, which was delivered to him by Guy Burgess at a meeting in Gibraltar. Philby passed his report on Franco's headquarters to Burgess who relayed it to London, and shortly afterwards Philby was ordered back to London to meet with Deutsch and Maly.
Reportedly, it had been intended that Philby assassinate Franco, but Maly reported to Moscow that while Philby was a loyal and willing agent he lacked the necessary courage to carry out the mission and instead proposed that he develop his career as a news correspondent. On 24 May 1937 he was appointed by The Times as the paper's accredited special correspondent with the Nationalist forces under Francisco Franco, with a generous expense account of £50 a month.
Among Philby's espionage duties for the Soviets was the writing of spurious love letters interlaced with codewords, and addressed to a fictitious girl in Paris who lived at 78 Rue de Grenelle. Years later he discovered, to his fury, that this was in fact the address of the Soviet Embassy in Paris, and the possibility had existed that he could have easily been found out.
In December 1937, near the Spanish town of Teruel, a shell hit just in front of the car in which Philby was traveling with the correspondents Edward J. (Eddie) 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 wounds, but Philby suffered only a minor head wound.
Philby's reports were so favorable to the Nationalist cause that he was personally awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit by Franco on March 2, 1938.
World War II
In 1940, Philby applied on Burgess' advice for a vacancy in Section D of SIS (later MI6), which had been set up in 1938, and subsequently met with War Office intermediary Marjorie Maxse, who assessed him as a suitable candidate. He then met with Maxse a few days later, Maxse being accompanied by Burgess who had volunteered to verify her assessment of Philby's suitability. Eventually the editor of The Times received a phone call asking whether Philby was available for war work and he was hired as a British intelligence officer.
When Section D was absorbed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the summer of 1940 (and Burgess was fired for "irreverence"), Philby was appointed as an instructor in the arts of "black propaganda" at the SOE's training establishment in Beaulieu, Hampshire.
In September 1941 Philby began working for Section V, the Iberian Section, in charge of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, and Africa. He soon became friends with the chief archivist and thereby gained access to files on Spain and Portugal, and was able to pass on to his Soviet controller information on SIS operations against Soviet targets. During 1942-43 Philby's responsibilities were expanded to include North Africa and Italy and he was made the deputy head of Section V by its head, Felix Cowgill, "in all intelligence matters".
In early 1944 SIS re-established Section IX, its prewar anti-Soviet section. Cowgill, who had previously headed, was placed in charge. In late 1944 it became known that "C", Sir Stewart Menzies, wanted to enlarge the section's mandate, Philby was instructed by his Soviet superiors to ensure that he became head of the section and eventually he managed to undermine Cowgill and accomplish this. As a Soviet agent, Philby had accomplished something of a coup.
During the two years he spent as head of Section IX, Philby had access to the identities of British intelligence officers and agents, and also to hundreds of classified documents from the Foreign Office, the War Office, and the Admiralty.
All went well for Philby until August, 1945, when Konstantin Volkov, an officer of the NKVD (later KGB) decided to defect to Britain with the promise that he would reveal the names of Soviet agents in SIS and the Foreign Office. When the report reached Philby's desk, with a bit of luck and clever scheming, he managed to get the assignment. He tipped off Moscow and then flew to Istanbul by way of Cairo. With the plane being delayed by storms, the ambassador being on his yacht in the Bosporus, the Russians had time to whisk Volkov off to Moscow and Philby returned to London after a close call.
Istanbul
After the war, Philby was sent as Head of Station to Istanbul under the cover of First Secretary to the British Embassy. While there, he received a visit from Guy Burgess. File KV 5/36 (1946) of British Military Intelligence contains the warning from Kim Philby to the Security Service of 9 July 1946 warning of possible Irgun attacks against the British legation in Beirut, just before the attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The File also includes discussion on the conflicting claims as to whether or not a warning was given.
Washington, D.C.
In 1949, Philby's next — and last — assignment was as First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, where he acted as liaison between the British Embassy and the newly formed CIA. His luck ran out, however. First came the discovery of the cryptonym HOMER (Donald Maclean) in the VENONA decrypts — a "jigsaw puzzle" of decrypts, decoded piecemeal because some Soviet code clerk had used a one-time pad twice; then came another visit from Guy Burgess who ensconced himself in the Philby household for a year and proceeded to behave inappropriately. Burgess was declared persona non grata, as was Philby soon after.
In January 1949, the British Government was informed that Venona project intercepts showed that nuclear secrets were passed to the Soviet Union from the British Embassy in Washington in 1944 and 1945 by an agent code-named 'Homer'. In 1950, Philby was asked to help track down this agent. Knowing from the start that 'Homer' was his old university friend, Second Secretary Donald Maclean, Philby warned Maclean in 1951, leading to the defection of Burgess and Maclean.
After the defection of his two friends, Philby was asked to resign from SIS, and he spent the next several years being questioned by MI5 and SIS. Since he did not break, however, he was finally cleared of being the "Third Man" by the Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons. Eventually he was re-employed as an SIS agent, with the cover as a correspondent in Beirut for The Observer and The Economist.
In October 1949 Philby arrived in Washington as British intelligence liaison to the newly created US intelligence agencies under the National Security Act of 1947. Philby received Venona material which the US was sharing with the UK, but he did not have information about the source, since Venona was one of the most highly rated top secrets. He shared a house in Washington, at 4100 Nebraska Avenue, N.W, with his friend from the Cambridge days, fellow British diplomat, intelligence officer and Soviet penetration agent, Guy Burgess.
In 1949, Philby was in Washington, D.C., as the MI6 liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The two agencies launched an attempted revolution in Albania. The exiled King Zog had offered his troops and other volunteers to help, but, for three years, every attempted landing in Albania met with Albanian army ambush (Albanians knew the emergency radio call routine). MI6 is believed to have failed only twice in its history and this attempt in Albania is one of them.
Philby is believed to have passed to Moscow information on the small size of the United States' stockpile of atomic weapons and its capacity (at that time, severely limited) to produce new atomic bombs. Based in part on that information, Stalin went ahead with a 1948 blockade of West Berlin and began a large-scale offensive armament of Kim Il Sung's North Korean Army and Air Force that would later culminate in the Korean War.
When Maclean was identified in April 1951, surveillance commenced to obtain evidence independent of Venona, as the US and UK did not want to reveal the existence of Venona. Maclean defected to Moscow with Guy Burgess a month later in May 1951. Philby came under instant suspicion as the "Third Man" who had tipped them off.
Philby had already been suspected by James Jesus Angleton, who had heard Philby declare after receiving his OBE in 1946, that "This country could do with a stiff dose of proper Socialism." CIA Director General Bedell Smith sent an ultimatum to the British that either Philby be fired, or they break off the intelligence relationship. He also made it clear to Sir Stuart Menzies that Philby was no longer acceptable to the CIA as an SIS liaison and had to leave the US.
Philby was summoned back to London in June 1951 by Menzies, where he denied knowing Maclean and said that he had been fooled completely by Burgess. His interviewers were unimpressed and Philby was unhappy at the prospect of being questioned as part of the enquiry into the escape of Burgess and Maclean. However, during subsequent interrogations Philby defended his actions by claiming that he had been acting as a double agent with the permission of SIS and he had indeed been given permission to approach the Soviets and pretend that he was willing to work for them. Following the enquiry, Philby was officially discharged from SIS but continued employment with them, working in Cyprus among other places.
Philby was denied his pension until an internal investigation failed to come up with definitive proof of his work with the NKVD. On 25 October 1955, against all expectations, he was "cleared" by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in an ill-timed statement made in the House of Commons: "While in government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously, and 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."
Beirut
Thus, in 1956 Philby was again in the employ of MI6 as an "informant on retainer" and was supposedly involved in Operation Musketeer, the British, French, and Israeli plan to attack Egypt and depose Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Better attested is his role as Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Economist, which also led to his exposure. Sometime in late 1962, a British-Jewish woman, Mrs. Flora Solomon, was attending a cocktail party in Tel Aviv and made a comment about how Philby, the journalist in Beirut, displayed sympathy for Arabs in his articles. She said that his masters were the Soviets and that she knew that he had always worked for them. The comment was overheard by someone at the party and was relayed to the offices of MI5 in London, which sent Victor Rothschild to interview her. Mrs. Solomon declared that she would never testify against Philby, but she admitted that he had told her he was a spy and had tried to recruit her to the Communist cause.
Although MI5 and MI6 could not immediately agree on how to deal with Philby, it was eventually agreed that a personal friend of Philby from his MI6 days, Nicolas Elliott, would be sent to confront him in Beirut. There seemed to be a constant leak of information and it is alleged that there was a high-level MI5 mole at the time. Although it is unclear whether Philby was aware of the developments against him vis-a-vis Flora Solomon, or whether he knew about the defection of Anatoly Golitsyn (which led to the arrest, escape, and defection to Moscow of fellow MI6 officer and Soviet agent George Blake), there is evidence that in the last few months of 1962 Philby began to drink heavily and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. Philby may have also been warned by Yuri Modin, a top Soviet handler who had served in the Soviet embassy in London, when he travelled to Beirut in September 1962. Modin was the controller of the "Cambridge Five".
It is reported that the first thing that Philby said upon meeting with Elliott was that he was "half expecting" to see him. Many sources claim that he confessed immediately when confronted with the evidence, while others, including Philby himself, have maintained that he continued to downplay the accusations. Although a further interrogation was scheduled in the last week of January 1963, Philby disappeared on 23 January. Records later revealed that the Dolmatova, a Soviet freighter, was called to port in Beirut on this date and had left so quickly its cargo remained scattered on the dock.
Always in danger of having his cover blown by the next Soviet defector, Philby, confronted by new evidence brought to him by an old SIS friend, Nicholas Elliott, finally defected to the Soviet Union in January 1963, departing from Beirut. While others, including Philby himself, have maintained that he continued to downplay the accusations, further interrogation was scheduled for the last week of January 1963; Philby disappeared on January 23. Records later revealed that the Soviet freighter Dolmatova had called on Beirut on this date and had left so quickly its cargo remained scattered on the dock. CIA operative Miles Copeland, a close friend of Kim Philby, describes how Philby was constantly being suspected of spying for the Soviets but succeeded in skillfully evading such suspicions for some time. Copeland was once handed an "ultra-thorough checklist" from his superior in an attempt to see if Philby committed any suspicious actions as prescribed by this form; he first objected to the idea of spying on Philby since he was his "friend”, but obliged under pressure later on. After Copeland's painstaking examination was over, he handed in his checklist to his superior, with none of the points in the checklist checked and the conclusion that Philby had not committed any suspicious acts. His superior responded by saying: "Aha, now that’s interesting, even a perfectly normal person must have done something, at least one thing, that is deemed suspicious by this checklist."
After Philby's defection, the CIA and MI6 largely gave up their attempts to plant agents in Soviet territory. Philby was also able to tell Moscow just how much the CIA knew about its operations. Moscow asked Philby not to bother saving spies who had served their purpose, but he sat on several reports that revealed the names of other Soviet spies anyway.
Moscow
Kim Philby surfaced in Moscow, and quickly discovered that he was not a colonel in the KGB as he ahd been led to believe, but still just agent TOM. It was 10 years before he walked through the doors of KGB headquarters. He suffered severe bouts of alcoholism. In Moscow, he seduced Maclean's American wife, Melinda, and abandoned his own wife, Eleanor, who left Russia in 1965.
According to information contained in the Mitrokhin Archive, the head of KGB counterintelligence, Oleg Kalugin, met Philby in 1972 and found him to be 'a wreck of a man'; "The bent figure caromed off the walls as he walked. Reeking of vodka, he mumbled something unintelligible in atrocious, slurred Russian."
Over the next few years Kalugin and the Young Turks in the Foreign Intelligence Directorate rehabilitated Philby, using him to devise active measures, and to run seminars for young agents about to be sent to Great Britain, Australia, or Ireland. In 1972 he married a Russian woman, Rufina Ivanova Pukhova, who was twenty years his junior, with whom he lived until his death at age 76, in 1988. His autobiography, My Silent War, was published in the West in 1968. Only posthumously did he receive the praise and appreciation which had escaped him in life; he was awarded a hero's funeral and numerous posthumous medals by a grateful USSR.
Philby was a close friend of the novelist Graham Greene, who reportedly left MI6 rather than become involved in exposing Philby. Greene's biographer, Norman Sherry, had this to say:
Perhaps Greene, always intuitive, resigned because he suspected that Philby was a Russian penetration agent. … If Greene did suspect Philby, it would be just the kind of thing that would catapult him out of the service rather than share his suspicions with the authorities.’
Personal life
In 1933, during a visit to Vienna, Philby met Alice (Litzi) Friedmann, an Austrian communist of Hungarian-Jewish origins, the daughter of a government official. They were married in February 1934 and left for England.
In London in 1941, he began to live with Aileen Furse, the daughter of Captain George Furse of the Royal Horse Artillery, and they had children while he was still married to Litzi. However, a divorce was finalized in December 1946, and a week later he married Aileen. They had three sons and two daughters together, and Aileen died in 1957. Philby had no other children.
In 1959, in Beirut, Philby married Eleanor Brewer, an American who had been married to an American journalist when he met her there. After Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, Eleanor joined him in Moscow, but she left him in 1965 to return to the US. She died in 1968. Her book, Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, was published around the same time. Philby had begun an affair with Donald Maclean's American wife Melinda, whose maiden name was Melinda Marling, probably in 1965. She left Maclean and went to live with Philby in 1968. However, they didn't marry and Philby left her for a much younger woman called Rufina Ivanova, whom he married in 1971. Rufina Ivanova is still alive, and is a co-author of The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years (2000)
Chronology
- 1912 Birth in India
- 1919 Attended Aldro preparatory school in Eastbourne
- 1924 Was a Queen's Scholar at 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. Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald defeated 27 October. Philby became a more ardent socialist. After obtaining only a third in his history exams he transferred to economics.
- 1932 Became treasurer of the Cambridge University Socialist Society.
- 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 24 February Philby married Alice (Litzy) Friedmann, born Kohlmann; 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 Guy 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. 20 May 1937 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 Secret Intelligence Service 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 MI6, Section V (Five). Philby took charge of the Iberian sub-section, responsible for British Intelligence in Spain and Portugal. Trained James Jesus Angleton in the arts and crafts of counterespionage.
- 1941 Begins to live with Aileen Furse, later his second wife. Office of Strategic Services 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 centres 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 MI6 (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 MI6 station.
- 1946 In December, divorce from his first wife, Litzi, finalized, marries Aileen Furse.
- 1949 Became MI6 representative in Washington, as senior British Secret Service officer working in liaison with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the newly created CIA. He occasionally visited Arlington Hall for discussions about VENONA; furthermore, he regularly received copies of summaries of VENONA translations as part of his official duties. 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 25 May, 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 25 October, questions tabled in parliament asking about the 'third man', Philby. Harold Macmillan, foreign secretary in the Eden cabinet, 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 British secret service arranged Philby to work for The Observer in Beirut as correspondent of and also The Economist; But that year Dick White, who suspected Philby of working as a Soviet agent, became head of MI6.
- 1957 Aileen, Philby's second wife, died.
- 1958 Married Eleanor Brewer.
- 1962 George Blake unmasked. Philby then confirmed as an identified Soviet agent.
- 1963 23 January, Philby disappeared in Beirut. The Soviet Union announced that it had granted Philby political asylum in Moscow. On 3 March, Eleanor Philby received a telegram from Philby postmarked Cairo, Egypt. On 3 June Izvestia located Philby with the Imam of Yemen. On 1 July, the British Government admitted that Philby had worked as a Soviet agent before 1946 and identified him as the 'third man'.
- 1965 Stripped of OBE following his exposure as a double agent.
- 1965 Awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the highest honours of the Soviet Union.
- 1965 Eleanor Philby leaves Moscow, returns to US. Philby begins affair with Melinda Maclean, wife of Donald Maclean.
- 1968 Wife Eleanor Philby dies.
- 1971 marries Rufina Ivanovna in Moscow.
- 1988 Death at the age of 76.
- 1991 Resurfaces in undocumented MOSSAD pictures taken when Philby is in Beruit.
Philby in popular culture
Literature
- The Tim Powers novel Declare is partly based on unexplained aspects of Philby's life, providing a supernatural context for his behavior (described by Powers as "tradecraft meets Lovecraft").
- In the Ted Allbeury novel The Other Side of Silence (1981) Philby, near the end of his life, asks to return to Britain.
- The Frederick Forsyth novel, The Fourth Protocol, features an elderly Kim Philby advising a Soviet leader on a plot to influence a British election in 1987.
- The Robert Littell novel The Company features Philby as a confidant of former CIA Counter-Intelligence chief James Angleton.
- Graham Greene's novel The Human Factor explores aspects of Philby's story.
- William F. Buckley, Jr.'s novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton
- William F. Buckley, Jr.'s novel Last Call for Blackford Oakes
- Chris Petit's novel The Passenger.
- John le Carré's novel (also a BBC television mini-series) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy focuses on the hunt for a Soviet agent patterned after Philby.
- The novel Fox at the Front by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson depicts Philby selling secrets to the Soviet Union during the alternate Battle of the Bulge where German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel turns on the Nazis and assists the Allies in capturing all of Berlin. Before he can sell the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, he is discovered by the British and is killed by members of MI5 who stage his death as a heart attack.
- He appears in the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor novel's The Turing Test as a cameo, Endgame and History 101 as a cameo.
Film and television
- Cambridge Spies, a 2003 four-part BBC drama, starring Toby Stephens as Kim Philby, Tom Hollander as Guy Burgess, Rupert Penry-Jones as Donald Maclean, and Samuel West as Anthony Blunt, which is told from Philby's point of view, recounts their lives and adventures from Cambridge days in the 1930s, through World War II, until the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951.
- The 2005 film A Different Loyalty is an unattributed account taken from Eleanor Philby's book, "Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved." 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. The names of all characters, including the lead characters, have been changed, and the film becomes highly speculative at the end.
- The character "Harry Lime" in the 1949 film The Third Man has been said to be based on Kim Philby, although Graham Greene has denied this. It is ironic that a few years later, Philby was suspected of being the "third man" in the spy scandal.
- Traitor is a television play loosely based on Philby's life.
- Joseph Brodsky's essay, Collector's Item, in his 1996 book, On Grief and Reason, contains a conjectured description of Philby's career, as well as speculations into his motivations and general thoughts on espionage and politics. The title of the essay refers to a postal stamp commemorating Philby - it was issued in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Music
- "Philby" by Rory Gallagher from the Top Priority album (1979) in which he draws parallels between his life on the road and Philby's.
- Pet Shop Boys' song Jack the Lad has four or five lines referencing Kim Philby. It is available on the album Alternative (1995).
- Philby, an unproduced musical by Katie Baldwin (book and lyrics) and Alan Moon (music).
- "Kim Philby", by the now-defunct Vancouver band Terror of Tiny Town, is a polka-esque retelling of some of Philby's story.
- "Up on the Catwalk" from Simple Minds' 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain makes a reference to Kim Philby.
- The downstairs bar of the Manchester night club The Haçienda was known as "The Kim Philby Bar".
Further reading
- Colonel David Smiley, "Irregular Regular", Michael Russell - Norwich - 1994 (ISBN 978-0859552028). Translated in French by Thierry Le Breton, Au coeur de l'action clandestine des commandos au MI6, L’Esprit du Livre Editions, France, 2008 (ISBN 978-2915960273). With numerous photographs. Memoirs of a SOE and MI6 officer during the Valuable Project.
- Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, 1973, published by Hamish Hamilton, London.
- Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files, 1994, published by Little, Brown & Company Limited, Canada, ISBN 0316910155 . Introduction by Phillip Knightley.
- Phillip Knightley, Philby: KGB Masterspy 2003, published by Andre Deutsch Ltd, London, ISBN 0233000488.
- Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, 1986, published by W.W. Norton & Company, London.
- Kim Philby, My Silent War, published by Macgibbon & Kee Ltd, London, 1968, or Granda Publishing, ISBN 0-586-02860-9. Introduction by Graham Greene
- Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, 1968, published by André Deutsch, Ltd., London.
- Richard Beeston, Looking For Trouble: The Life and Times of a Foreign Correspondent, 1997, published by Brassey's, London.
- Desmond Bristow, A Game of Moles, 1993, published by Little Brown & Company, London.
- Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, 2001, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York.
- Anthony Cave Brown, "C": The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill, 1987, published by Macmillan, New York.
- John Fisher, Burgess and Maclean, 1977, published by Robert Hale, London.
- S. J. Hamrick, Deceiving the Deceivers, 2004, published by Yale University Press, New Haven.
- Malcolm Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove: Chronicles of Wasted Time: Number 2, 1974, published by William Morrow & Company, New York.
- Barrie Penrose & Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, 1986, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, New York.
- Nigel West, editor, The Guy Liddell Diaries: Vol. I: 1939-1942, 2005, published by Routledge, London
- Nigel West & Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, 1998, published by Yale University Press, New Haven.
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