Two years later, a Sunday Times correspondent was in Moscow and about to pack his bags after an unsuccessful attempt to interview the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, when, out of the blue, he was invited to a room in his hotel. Interrogated repeatedly regarding his intelligence work and his connection with Burgess, he continued to deny that he had acted as a Soviet agent. 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. 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. Fergus announced to some children with whom he was playing that My Daddy wants to stop all wars. [64], In 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a major in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, defected to the United States from his diplomatic post in Helsinki. [84] Despite reports to the contrary, Philby's wife claimed in a 1997 interview that the idea of Philby becoming depressed and destitute in Moscow was "a myth". [11][pageneeded]. ", "John le Carr, The Art of Fiction No. 1951Tips off fellow Cambridge Spy Donald Maclean that a warrant has been issued for his arrest. "Kim believed in a just society and devoted his whole life to communism. 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. But the rezident (Russian term for spymaster) in France, probably Pierre at this time, suggested to Moscow that he suspected Philby's motives. 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. After Donald Maclean fled to Moscow to escape arrest in Britain as the spy who, for 15 years, had passed state secrets to the Soviet Union, friends of his wife, Melinda, found it easy to believe that she knew nothing of her husbands treachery. 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. [22][23], Alexander Orlov (born Lev Feldbin; code-name Swede), Philby's controller in Madrid, who had once met him in Perpignan, France, also defected. Philby had other less damaging routines: a cup of Russian tea at 7am and English tea with milk at 5pm, drunk from a fine porcelain cup. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. 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. There, he underwent MI5 interrogation aimed at ascertaining whether he had acted as a "third man" in Burgess and Maclean's spy ring. [36][37] 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 Philby's intentions but was ignored time and time again.[5]. His wife Eleanor joined him in Moscow, and the Philbys and the Macleans spent a lot of time together, going to the ballet or just having dinner and playing bridge. [58] Another meeting was scheduled to take place in the last week of January. He. The head of MI6, Dick White, only recently transferred from MI5, had suspected Philby as the "third man". Philby jnr admitted that when the news broke, he felt a sense of something approaching quiet approval. A similar lapse occurred with a report from the Imperial Japanese Embassy in Moscow sent to Tokyo. Philby's work led to the deaths of dozens of British agents, making him a reviled traitor once he was exposed in Britain. By the end of the Second World War he had become a high-ranking member. When he died, in 1988, he was buried with honors by the Soviet authorities. I hope you've enough decency left to understand why. Change). He was given a hero's funeral, and posthumously awarded numerous medals [87] by the Soviets: Order of Lenin, Order of the Red Banner, Order of Friendship of Peoples, Order of the Great Patriotic War, Lenin Medal and Jubilee Medal "Forty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 19411945". They met each other socially but soon fell out. Want to Read. He trained Albanian commandossome of whom were former Nazi collaboratorsin Libya or Malta. There, a tall man in a blue suit and red bow-tie held out his hand and said: I am Donald Maclean. With him in the room was Guy Burgess. Harry St John Bridger Philby Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) (3 April 1885, Badulla, British Ceylon - 30 September 1960, Beirut, Lebanon), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah ( ), was a British Arabist, adviser, explorer, writer, and colonial office intelligence officer. Born in Rotterdam, George was the son of Albert Behar, a Turkish-born Sephardic Jew, and his wife, Catherine (nee Beijderwellen), a Dutch Protestant. [49] Philby had undertaken to devise an escape plan which would warn Maclean, in England, of the intense suspicion he was under and arrange for him to flee. JOHN Philby, the eldest son of Soviet spy Kim Philby, who was a double agent and the notorious Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s, has died in England. It seemed a fitting finale for such a notable spy. In early May 1951, Burgess got three speeding tickets in a single daythen pleaded diplomatic immunity, causing an official complaint to be made to the British Ambassador. He said that at the time of his recruitment as a spy there were no prospects of his being useful; he was instructed to make his way into the Secret Service, which took years, starting with journalism and building up contacts in the establishment. In 1964 when he was 20, the young Philby was fined 15 and placed on probation for two years for stealing, with two friends, a radio, alcohol, cigarettes and cash valued in all at 75 from a sports pavilion at Greenwich. [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. 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. However, Pukhova said the fear that she would leave had helped her husband temper his intake in later years. In the same interview, she confirmed that Philby was a heavy drinker when they first met, but later became sober. [54][61] There, his journalism served as cover for renewed work for MI6. "It was winter and we were going out for a walk and I found one of my boots had disappeared. But it wasnt true. He was paid 500 roubles a month (the average Soviet salary in 1960 was Rbls80.60 a month and Rbls122 in 1970)[76][77] and his family was not immediately able to join him in exile. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957.[91]. Donald refused to become part of the twilight brigade community of defectors, down-at-heel, disillusioned and wondering how they had got there. Melinda fitted the bill. Philby's less attractive personal qualities were matched by a charm to which many of his MI6 colleagues succumbed. There was nothing more [he] could do. His arrest led to others, Harry Gold, a courier with whom Fuchs had worked, David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He didnt seem to mind that their marriage was over. [86][pageneeded]. n ADAPTED from A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps, to be published by The Bodley Head on April 26 at 20. Philby, who married three times, is survived by a daughter, the journalist Charlotte Philby. "If he continued drinking, he got inebriated quickly and changed in front of your eyes," she said. His father Harold ''Kim'' Philby was a product of the British ruling class but, like his own eccentric father, the explorer and Arabist St John Philby, contemptuous of it. [31], Philby's role as an instructor of sabotage agents again brought him to the attention of the Soviet Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU). Alasdair Soussi. "His alcoholism was suicide," she told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. He got himself a job teaching English in a school. In a way hes always just been my father. 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. [11][pageneeded], In July 1939, Philby returned to The Times office in London. Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying, January 24, 2013 by Ian Allen She would be his silent witness for all the difficult years ahead. He later wrote "she had got a tantalising scrap of information about a young English journalist whom the Soviet intelligence had sent to Spain during the Civil War. 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. Philby was only an agent of one service, the KGB. Chicago-born Melinda, whom he married in France in 1940, knew all along that Donald was a spy. 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. "There was one funny incident," she remembered. He had five, one of whom, incidentally, was named after George Washington, the American president. They lived together for three years, until a younger woman caught the philandering Philbys eye. With his brilliant mind and First from Cambridge, Maclean could bask in being the superior intellect to an under-educated, attractive woman who was both affectionate and popular, where he was withdrawn, giving nothing of himself away. But Maclean sobered up and went cold turkey in a detoxification clinic. By the time she left Russia, Maclean was in his final decline, in and out of hospital with cancer from his lifetime of smoking. Melinda, it turned out, had driven to Lausanne, where tickets were waiting and luggage had been left in a station locker. Shortly after the extent of Philby's penetration was publicised in October. 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. 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. We retrace the steps of the vast desert's earliest western adventurers and uncover tales of rivalry, stealth and concern for the future of the Bedouin. Harry St John Philby was devastated to not become the first westerner to cross the Empty Quarter. Donald is well and happy to be with his family again. I liked her determination. The news that Philby, a former MI6 officer, had been spying for the Russians since 1933 sounded an alarm in Whitehall. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.[2]. 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. '', Finding himself the son of the most reviled man in Britain, Philby jnr was nonetheless surprised to discover how like his father he was; he was the closest of his siblings to his father, and visited him in the Soviet Union on at least 12 occasions. [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. To the frequent question, ''No relation, I hope? Barclay reported the complaint to London. [7][pageneeded], At Cambridge, Philby showed his "leaning towards communism," in the words of his father St John, who went on to write: "The only serious question is whether Kim definitely intended to be disloyal to the government while in its service. They took the train to Zurich, where they changed trains to Schwarzach in Austria. How? burial place . Another effort was made using a Turkish gulet for a seaborne landing, but it never left port. Kim Philby, , . He was a sad traitor. Johnson was killed outright, and Neil and Sheepshanks soon died of their injuries. For the Soviets, Philby was an invaluable asset, ensuring the correct use of idiomatic and diplomatic English phrases in their disinformation efforts. We searched every corner until Kim suddenly struck himself on the head with his hand, went to a cupboard and brought back the boot. [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. From April 1950, Maclean had been the prime suspect in the investigation into the Embassy leak. [73] On 30 July, Soviet officials announced that they had granted him political asylum in the USSR, along with Soviet citizenship. In 1946, Philby arranged a divorce from Litzi. 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. Melinda, now officially Natasha Frazer, hated Kuybyshev, which she found very primitive, and for a while Donald was depressed and disillusioned by the reality of Soviet Russia. When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Philby's contact with his Soviet controllers was lost and Philby failed to attend the meetings that were necessary for his work. When they had not returned on the Sunday night, her mother was frantic. I knew what I wanted to know and that was the end of the affair. The Macleans lived well, housed in a smart building overlooking the river, in a splendid six-room flat which they gradually filled with bric--brac and furniture shipped from home. Colonel Redl from the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WW1 probably was a more devastating spy. He said "It was a very dirty storybut after all our work does imply getting dirty hands from time to time but we do it for a cause that is not dirty in any way". When he died, in 1988, he was buried with honors by the Soviet authorities. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. H. Saint John Philby, in full Harry Saint John Bridger Philby, (born April 3, 1885, Saint Johns, Badula, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka]died September 30, 1960, Beirut, Lebanon), British explorer and Arabist, the first European to cross the Rub al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, of Arabia from east to west. After leaving Cambridge, Philby worked as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of France. 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. 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. Philby was given the task of dealing with Volkov by British intelligence. He became more optimistic once the family was deemed fully rehabilitated and they moved to Moscow in 1955. Litzi lived in Paris before returning to London for the duration of the war; she ultimately settled in East Germany. 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. 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. You should have seen his face.". 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. Eventually, Tommy visited Kim five times in Moscow in the 1970s. When Melinda and the children joined him, they moved into a small apartment and the children were put into the local Soviet schools. Most intelligence historians believe that Philby was almost single-handedly responsible for the deaths of dozens even hundreds of Western intelligence officers and agents who perished during the Cold War while on missions in the USSR and Eastern Europe. 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 However, his son told The Telegraph that his fathers contribution to the physical demise of Western intelligence operatives is overstated: there is no information that anyone died as a result of Kim Philbys treachery, he said. From 1947, they infiltrated the southern mountains to build support for former King Zog. We got together in our cabin to discuss our plans. However, when Elliott asked him to sign a written statement, he hesitated and requested a delay in the interrogation. A few days after her return to Switzerland, she told her mother she had run into an old friend in the local market and hed invited her and the children to stay with him for the weekend in his villa at the other end of Lake Geneva.

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